All Posts

All Posts (549)

• 

  Published on

  2022-03-07 2:57 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  russiaukrainewar

  Evil triumphs when good men do nothing

  I never thought that I would write an article on this site of mine about war, peace and a threat to not only an entire nation's existence, but mine, too. But as this website has some reach (there's around 75 000 of you each month), I feel that I have a responsibility to say and do something.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-03-01 4:31 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azurefunctionscors

  Azure Functions suddenly throwing CORS errors when ran locally? Easy fix(es)!

  In this article, I'm listing the quick fixes to your Azure Functions suddenly throwing seemingly random and very unexpected CORS errors. I have run into this so many times that I had to list these (admittedly simple) fixes in order of importance purely for myself - but perhaps some of these will help you as well! 😁 CORS issues can be frustrating but the issue is usually, simple to fix - as long as you know what you are doing. But first, let's take a step back - what was the issue, again?

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-02-27 3:08 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  iiswindows

  How to install IIS (Internet Information Services) on Windows 10?

  It's the roaring twenties again, cloud is the hot stuff, and nobody needs a server anymore. Right? Nope! I've been involved in more on-prem or hybrid projects in the last 12 months than in the last 3-4 years combined. There are plenty of industries and valid uses for still setting up on-prem servers. And quite often, that includes setting up IIS (Internet Information Services) on said machines. And of course, there's the classic use case - local development.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-02-22 11:27 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  dockerhomeassistant

  How to move the Home Assistant SQLite database in Docker on Windows?

  This article explains how you can move your Home Assistant's SQLite database files to another location by mapping them to another volume in Docker. Using Docker on Windows. Which might not be a smart move, but it's one I went with anyway. The article will explain how to do this with docker-compose, but the steps pretty much apply to vanilla docker as well. With that said - let's move on!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-02-15 3:29 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  authorizationblazor

  Groups-based authorization in Blazor WebAssembly

  This article will take a look at a neat authorization option for Blazor WebAssembly - utilizing group memberships when defining policies. This isn't a tutorial or an overview of Blazor - rather, we start from you already having your Blazor WebAssembly project set up, and we'll be taking a look into modifying it to use group membership claims with policy-based authorization. This is a bit trickier than using roles, which Blazor WebAssembly already supports quite well. But before that - Blazor?

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-02-08 6:32 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsazureiotedgejmespath

  Azure IoT Edge gotchas - and how to overcome them!

  This article describes the gotchas and weird one-offs that I've encountered with Azure IoT Edge so far. Consider them not-too-thoroughly tested quick fixes that aren't significant enough to warrant an actual blog post themselves :) Okay - let's get to them gotchas, then! Random learnings from Azure IoT Edge projects

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-02-01 4:25 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azureiotedgevscode

  How to fix "Cannot start service edgeHubDev: Ports are not available: listen tcp 0.0.0.0:8883"

  Here is another fun one for the books! In this article, I will explain how to fix a problem with the Azure IoT Edge dev simulator, when it fails to start due to an underlying problem with Docker not having access to your defined ports. This will probably happen to one of the ports used by the Edge Hub system module by default - 5671, 8883, or 443.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-01-27 4:26 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azureiotedgedockervscode

  How to fix "exec user process caused: no such file or directory" in Docker on Windows?

  Another one in the series of "random things that break when you try to run Docker on Windows"! I was just minding my own business, trying to run an Azure IoT Edge custom module - a Docker container, really - locally, when suddenly everything broke and one of my Docker containers wouldn't run anymore, which broke the rest of my stuff pretty badly. Instead, it failed with a cryptic and surprising error "exec user process caused: no such file or directory" .

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-01-25 5:29 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  ef-coreentityframeworkcore

  How to run EF Core commands when your entities are in a different project from your dbcontext?

  This article explains how to achieve that nice configuration where you can reuse your .NET EF Core (Entity Framework Core) entities in different projects - even being separate from the project holding your DbContexts! You might want to do this if you have a common data model between a number of very different projects - but you will still need to have a way to add new migrations, apply the current ones to a database or possibly remove deprecated migrations.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-01-18 7:04 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  dockerpostgresqltimescaledb

  How to run SQL commands in a Postgre SQL Docker container?

  This article will explain how to run your arbitrary SQL commands against a Postgre SQL database running in a Docker container in Windows. That should be super simple, but since I never remember anything like this by heart, I had to google it - and turns out, either I didn't know how to google this properly or people haven't bothered to document this. So, let's fix that. But first, why did I need to do this, again?

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-01-11 3:12 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  corshtaccesswordpress

  How to modify CORS settings using a .htaccess file

  Recently, I needed to host a web-based thingamajiggy in WordPress and needed to include a couple of custom libraries. For the sake of quick iteration, I decided to use a public FTP folder that I already had on the same server in order to host this. So I had configured a subdomain to host the files, and wanted to reference them from my WordPress site. Not quite a CDN, but something a little bit like that. Well, of course, I ran into an issue again.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2022-01-04 3:43 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  dockerwsl

  How to solve Vmmem consuming ungodly amounts of RAM when running WSL?

  This was another (luckily pretty shallow) rabbit hole down some corporate IT and weird default configurations by our favorite tech-daddy Microsoft. In this article, I will describe one possible reason for a process called Vmmem.exe consuming enough RAM to crash pretty much everything else running on your machine. But let's take a step back first - what happened?

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-12-31 11:50 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  yearreview

  2021 - Year Review!

  Well, it's been a year. It certainly does not feel like it has been a whole 12 months since I last wrote one of these, you know? I failed every single one of the goals I set for 2021, but I'm not going to lie, family takes (and deserves) so much time that it is no wonder that our hobbies suffer a bit. But still - writing these year reviews has become a tradition, so without further ado - let's get to it! 😁 Website stats

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-12-20 10:30 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azurefunctionsazureiothub

  How to fix "Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage: Server encountered an internal error. Please try again after some time." when using IoTHub trigger for Azure Functions?

  One more article before Christmas! 😁 This time, I'll be fixing a function that's triggering based on new messages received through my IoT Hub in my Azure Functions project. Technically speaking, this is super simple to implement - your function needs to define an IoTHubTrigger , with an Event Hub name and usually a Connection String (I don't know why I'm Sentence Casing that, too, but I'll stick to it!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-12-15 6:05 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsnpm

  How to authenticate against npm registries in Azure DevOps?

  Another one in the series of "this should've been easy, but alas, you're the edge case". "You" being "me", and the "edge case" being our internal npm feed (registry), for whatever reason. Ah, well - life would be extremely boring if everything always went according to documentation, right? So, instead of the built-in ways to access npm feeds, this solution includes some PowerShell. Ah - that's when you know it's going to be good, right?

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-12-10 3:57 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  signalrwebsockets

  How to test SignalR-connection in the browser?

  So a while back I posted about testing your "vanilla" WebSockets connection directly in the browser - and while that's nice and easy, sometimes you need to class up a bit. In my case that meant upgrading to SignalR (for some corporate and enterprisey reasons as usual). It makes sense to leave behind the easy, simple, lightweight and somewhat transparent WebSockets to "upgrade" to the enterprise-ready (and arguably quite a lot less transparent) SignalR?

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-12-07 4:20 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcoresignalrwebsockets

  How to access claims of a SignalR user in ASP.NET Core?

  I tend to post a lot of articles about different gotchas and configuration tweaks, but this one goes back to the roots a bit - just me and a couple of other devs hacking some code together and being blocked by a bit of an obstacle, that's then fixed by - you guessed it - writing niftier code. Or actually, I suppose it was more about removing some and adding some of the right stuff... But isn't that what most programming is about? Anyway - let's take a look at configuring SignalR for an ASP.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-12-01 4:52 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azurefunctions

  Azure Function build fails with "Mono.Cecil.AssemblyResolutionException: Failed to resolve assembly: Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Core"

  Another fun one with Azure Functions! At least it's a simple one: this time, I ran into a weird issue while doing some code reusing - well, copy-pasting - between a couple of different projects. I was lovingly hand-crafting some Azure Functions, while suddenly the Azure Functions host would throw this in ugly red letters: Mono.Cecil.AssemblyResolutionException: Failed to resolve assembly: 'Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Core, Version=3.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=adb9793829ddae60' at Mono.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-11-23 7:41 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  authenticationazureazurekeyvault

  How to update from deprecated Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication to new and shiny Azure.Security.KeyVaults.Secrets?

  So, a while ago I posted about a fairly simple way to write your code for fetching secrets (and other confidential stuff) from Azure Key Vault in such a way, that it would work the same way both in Azure and on your local dev box. I find this pretty important, as it reduces the need for weird workarounds and fallbacks in your code, and at the same time enables you to harness the Azure Key Vault for that sweet spot of "good enough security without breaking your back or the bank".

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-11-16 4:03 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azure-adblazor

  Fixing Blazor WebAssembly .NET 6 MSAL authorization bug

  Let's make this short and sweet. In this particular case, upgrading a Blazor WASM solution to .NET 6 broke the authentication when deployed to Azure. The same issue could probably happen to a fresh project, though. This is what you're running into: If you open your browser console, you'll see 2 interesting errors - first: dotnet.6.0.0.o2we6pverp.js:1 mono_wasm_runtime_ready login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-11-09 3:21 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  gitgithub

  How to nuke your Git(Hub) commit history?

  Ah - this was a fun one. I needed to figure out how to purge, flush and clear your commit history on GitHub. Turns out it isn't as easy as clicking a button in the web user interface - the world is apparently not ready yet! 😁 Luckily, it wasn't that complicated either - and the steps should work for other flavors of git as well. Background Always remember to .gitignore your secrets, folks! And if you forget, pray you're not committing to a public repository!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-11-02 6:48 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  asp-netazurefunctions

  How to fix "Unable to cast object of type 'System.Net.Http.HttpRequestMessage' to type 'Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http.HttpRequest'."

  This article explains how to fix an issue where your Azure Functions function (yes, that's a capital F and a lowercase f to denote the difference between the product and the piece of compute) fails to fire when a POST request comes in, even though it's configured to do so, and instead throws a somewhat confusing error message about HttpRequestMessage not being castable to HttpRequest - even though you KNOW HttpRequestMessage works just fine for receiving POST requests with payload!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-10-26 5:16 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azurekeyvaultvisual-studio

  How to authenticate against Azure Key Vault both in Azure and local development environment?

  Azure Key Vault is great. But when developing locally, it can be a bit of a pain. You can always circumvent it and create some classical solution, such as simply wrapping all of your key/secret assignments in if-else-clauses that will use local configuration if you're running locally and only call the Azure Key Vault if you're in the cloud... But that feels so incredibly early-2000-ish. Isn't there a better option available? I mean - obviously, there is!

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-10-19 8:12 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  cosmosdbdotnet5

  System.Text.Json.JsonPropertyName not working for CosmosDb in .NET Core/5/6?

  This article explains how to fix an annoying issue with Microsoft's SDK for CosmosDb v3 - it comes with a Newtonsoft.Json dependency, that most of Microsoft's recent packages have let go of. With .NET Core 3.1 having shipped with System.Text.Json included, and (mostly) replacing Newtonsoft.Json, it's kind of the preferred option. However, CosmosDb v3 SDK doesn't support it and by default requires you to use Newtonsoft.

  Read more →
• 

  Published on

  2021-10-12 4:28 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  assemblygraph-api

  Errors loading an assembly that's using Microsoft Graph API

  Man, do I run into all kinds of issues with the smallest Azure Functions that I develop. And it's mostly my fault. The silver lining is that you're here to read this article, so you probably ran into this same stuff. Well - you should be happy to hear that this article describes fixes to a couple of issues - let's see if they help you out as well!

  Read more →