All Posts

All Posts (543)

• 

  Published on

  2020-05-07 6:30 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  ms-sql-serversqlsql-querysqlservermanagementstudio

  How to clean up duplicates from MS SQL Database?

  This article explains how to query and remove duplicate entries from a Microsoft SQL database using T-SQL. The same model works both for Azure Databases (in Azure SQL Query Editor) and databases on MS SQL Server (using SSMS - SQL Server Management Studio). I had to do this a while back due to a bug in an API creating multiple entities with the same content - save for the Identity field. Fun! Background Why bother? That's a (somewhat) valid question.

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• 

  Published on

  2020-04-30 10:57 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  applicationinsightsazureazuremonitor

  How to fix weird "Production Breakpoints" errors in an Azure App Service?

  This article describes a curious fix I found to an issue where Application Insights (seemingly) crashes your Azure App Service, leaving behind interesting, yet non-descriptive errors in the Application Event Logs. The actual symptoms might be your Azure app service just timing out with no errors being surfaced on the front-end. Frustrating. Problem Does your Azure App Service's event log look like this? Full of "Production Breakpoints" with weird errors about named pipes?

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• 

  Published on

  2020-04-21 12:16 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  cef-coreentityframeworkentityframeworkcore

  How to get the EF Core Connection String?

  This article describes how to access and extract the connection strings from your Entity Framework (Core) database context objects. This is quite convenient if you need to display or log the connection string used for your current DbContext for some reason - or if you somehow form your DbContext objects dynamically, and need to verify which connection string you're using. I'm sure there are other use cases, too. You probably have an interesting one, if you landed on this page!

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• 

  Published on

  2020-04-15 10:03 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  microsoft-teams

  Tips on organizing an online conference using Microsoft Teams

  Writing this in a country under lockdown, it feels like every single conference in the world has either been canceled or switched to being online-only. And right now, that's definitely for the best! But it does pose quite a dilemma for those in charge of these events - how do you organize an event for potentially thousands of attendees, online? How do you foster great interaction between the audience and speakers? How do you encourage your attendees to mingle as well?

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• 

  Published on

  2020-03-31 8:58 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  microsoft-teamsoffice-groupspowershell

  How to fix a Teams team with no Owners?

  As Teams adoption grows (partially driven by the megatrend of digitalization, partially by the massive surge in working from home due to Covid-19), different problems managing Teams also become more obvious. The growth seems to have been largely organic. Teams and organizations are adopting the tools that best help them get their work done with little regard to how the tools are maintained and best used. Teams are often created as needed, and by whoever needs them.

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• 

  Published on

  2020-03-25 11:05 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcoreazureblazor

  How to fix "HTTP Error 500.32 - ANCM Failed to Load dll"

  Yikes - ever ran into this error after deploying your ASP.NET Core web application to an Azure App Service? Yeah, me too. And when it's a production deployment, and the error didn't happen in test/QA environment, that's even more fun. This article describes a couple of ways to fix it, though. You wouldn't believe these 3 solutions to fix the error "500.32", and what they look like now! Oh heavens, what have I done with that subheading?

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• 

  Published on

  2020-03-19 12:22 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  guidemicrosoft-teamsux

  Why you shouldn't attach files from other channels in Microsoft Teams?

  This article will describe a surprising issue with Microsoft Teams, and a simple workaround. 😊 Essentially, using the out-of-the-box "Attach" > "Recent" messaging extension in Teams has a couple of caveats or edge cases, that make it problematic to use. Instead, either move the file to the proper location using the "Files" tab or share a link to your file (also available under "Attach" > "Browse Teams and Channels").

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• 

  Published on

  2020-03-10 10:58 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  remoteworkingwaysofworkingwfhworkingfromhome

  Top Tips To Survive Working From Home!

  Due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus, there's a sudden influx of people working remotely. As someone, who has only recently gone through the transformation from a regular office worker (with an assigned desk and all that classic stuff) to a full-time remote worker, I thought I could share some of my experiences on how to survive WFH (that's Working From Home for those of you who're even newer to this stuff than I am!) Introduction Up until recently, I used to work at Valo's Montreal office.

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• 

  Published on

  2020-03-05 12:01 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcorerazor

  Adding new MVC/Razor items fails throwing an error about hostpolicy.dll

  This article describes how to fix the error " There was an error running the selected code generator: 'Failed to load the dll from \bin\Debug\netcoreapp\win-x86\hostpolicy.dll, HRESULT: 0x800700C1 An error occurred while loading required library hostpolicy.dll'" when you're adding a new scaffolded item (such as a Razor page or ASP.NET Core MVC Controller) in Visual Studio. Description Imagine this: You're developing your run-of-the-mill, basic, everyday ASP.NET Core web application.

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• 

  Published on

  2020-02-27 11:26 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcoreauthenticationcnetcorenetcore3

  How to disable "Register" action in ASP.NET Core?

  Sometimes you'll need the default identity for your ASP.NET Core application, but want to disable the registration of new users. Sounds pretty basic, right? However, there's actually no easy switch you can just flip to enable or disable said functionality. I went through a lot of different articles and ideas by other people. Most of them involved fiddling with IdentityController, creating new scaffolded pages, adding new Actions with redirection code, and who knows what else...

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• 

  Published on

  2020-02-26 11:48 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azureazuredevopsdevopsnuget

  Fun with Azure DevOps NuGet package versioning!

  This article will briefly explain the different NuGet package versioning schemes - both automatic and manual - available. Then we'll take a look at how to implement a nifty, and quite frankly, downright elegant automatic versioning scheme for your NuGet packages. Okay - returning from quite a trip down another rabbit hole, I think it's a good time to document some of my findings in regards to Azure DevOps NuGet package versioning !

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• 

  Published on

  2020-02-26 11:40 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  loggingnetcorenetcore3

  Adding Debug listeners to your console application fails in .NET Core

  Every now and then comes the need to write your console output to a log file. There's a simple way to do this in .NET Framework, and quite a few online articles detailing a borderline one-liner on how to do achieve it: Adding a log file listener(s) by calling Debug.Listeners - something like this: var tr1 = new TextWriterTraceListener(System.Console.Out); Debug.Listeners.Add(tr1); var tr2 = new TextWriterTraceListener(System.IO.File.CreateText("log.txt")); Debug.Listeners.

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• 

  Published on

  2020-02-18 7:43 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  microsoftexceloffice

  How to change Excel CSV delimiter?

  This article will explain how you can change the Excel list delimiter for your CSV (or other) file exports. Because it isn't always a comma. And setting the delimiter won't escape or strip the same characters in the values, so it'll mess up your data quite easily. Recently, I needed to find a way to import data from an old Excel file to a custom-coded system that could import CSV files. However, the data was fairly non-sanitized - containing commas, semicolons, and other weird characters.

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• 

  Published on

  2020-02-11 9:14 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  ms-sql-serversqlservermanagementstudio

  How to connect to your local MSSQL server using SSMS?

  Every now and then you run into a situation, where you really need to run some SQL against your local development database. That database, at least in my case, is hosted on your local SQL Server Express. Connecting to a local SQL Server should be a walk in a park, right? Eh, well... While using a connection string to connect to said DB is easy, you can't do that with the SQL Server Management Studio. I wish you could, but hey - it is what it is. There's a couple of ways to connect, though!

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• 

  Published on

  2020-02-05 12:12 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  microsoftstreamoffice365video

  Office 365 video migration to Office Stream imminent - Get Ready!

  While this post will mostly be about the highly topical migration from Office 365 Video to Microsoft Stream, there's also a fair amount of rambling about Microsoft's partner strategy and a bit of history included. I'm starting with the main stuff and then proceeding to the ranty parts, so just skip the last 75% of the post if you don't care about that kind of stuff! On to the content, then !

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• 

  Published on

  2020-01-29 5:45 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  androidcustomromlenovolineageos

  How to use TWRP to flash an Android device that refuses to boot to TWRP?

  Last Christmas holiday I was tasked by older relatives to fix an Android tablet they had bought. One of those absolutely useless, 100€ devices that can't really run any apps, and struggle to even start. My first proposition was to return the device - but it was already past the return window. Lenovo 's bloated nightmare version of an Android was likely the biggest reason for slowness.

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• 

  Published on

  2020-01-22 8:01 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azureazurefunctions

  Azure Functions host quits with "The system cannot find the file specified"

  So, another interesting issue I ran into when developing Azure Functions locally. What an endless bag of funsies! 😁 This time, the issue was simple but infuriating - my Azure Functions host would just silently close when debugging: none of the breakpoints would be hit, and no information would be logged anywhere. Azure Functions Core Tools (2.4.432 Commit hash: 3371a87e0fce2aa35986c0de8e77d5d618163b91) Function Runtime Version: 2.0.12332.

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• 

  Published on

  2020-01-22 5:38 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azureazurefunctions

  How to extract more information out of your Azure Functions host failing silently?

  I don't know about you, but it's happened to me a few times: fire up your Azure functions project, hit F5 to start debugging project builds without errors, Azure Functions host starts... And shuts down right away. This article has a few quick and simple tips on how to extract a bit more information from the Azure Functions host (func.exe) , when it's just silently failing. This means by default you won't get any information about what's going wrong.

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• 

  Published on

  2020-01-14 9:13 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  chmodwordpress

  An easy fix for WordPress media uploads failing after a year/month change

  This article explains one possible fix to a situation, where your pictures in WordPress fail to show up. In this particular case, uploading, editing and even selecting pictures for your articles works - just displaying them doesn't work. Alternatively, programmatic access might fail as well: in my case, ShortPixel reported an error "There was an error and your request was not processed: Could not download the file (404 Not Found)".

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• 

  Published on

  2020-01-09 3:04 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuretls

  App Service refuses connections with error: "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it"

  This blog post describes a very specific fix to a very specific issue. In a software project that consisted of a desktop client application and some APIs hosted on Azure, we ran into an error where some connections to APIs would fail with an error like this: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. What gives?

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• 

  Published on

  2019-12-31 7:00 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  newyearsresolutionyearreview

  2019 - Year Review (200th post on this blog!)

  When I started this blog in 2015 as a place to stash my, eh, thoughtful workarounds , I didn't think I'd ever hit 200 live articles (with another hundred still in draft mode). Or that I'd get half a million people reading them in a year! Man, I didn't know either one of these things when I was writing my 2018 review , which feels like was just a moment ago.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-12-30 7:52 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  obfuscarpowershell

  Obfuscar 2.0 errors with loading types from assembly

  I plugged Obfuscar into my build pipeline (the easiest configuration ever, by the way) because I needed to obfuscate a DLL I was going to push as a NuGet package. The DLL was obfuscated without changing any of the public APIs, Classes or Parameters - only internal stuff was scrambled. Simple stuff. Presumably.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-12-26 12:11 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  cloudflaregutenbergwordpress

  WordPress blog article edit mode: No Tags or Categories visible?

  This post describes a couple of useful solutions or workarounds for an awkward situation, where you can't manage the metadata of your articles on WordPress. This hampers greatly your ability to organize your posts - and if you're using WordPress like I'm using, also lowers the visibility of your new articles (I'm using the tags as hashtags when sharing to social channels)! We don't want that. But what's actually causing it?

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• 

  Published on

  2019-12-19 1:30 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcoreauthenticationazure-adoauth

  How to resolve AADSTS90056 - "The endpoint only accepts POST requests. Received a GET request."

  This post details my very simple solution to an extremely unnecessary and kind-of simple error that I encountered when logging into SharePoint. However, you could run into the same error after configuring Azure Active Directory authentication to a custom web application. AI-powered summary: How to resolve AADSTS90056 error for Azure AD apps The AADSTS90056 error means that the resource principal (the app or service you’re trying to access) was not found in the Azure AD tenant.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-12-10 9:45 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  delveblogsmicrosoftswaysharepointblog

  Classic SharePoint blogs are going away - what next?

  So the interesting news is not over - Microsoft recently announced that their personal blogging platform for Office 365, Delve Blogs, is getting retired. Now it turns out Classic SharePoint blogs are also getting cut. This leaves some organizations in a bit of a tough spot - what to use for blogging from now on? In this article, I'm taking a look at what brought us here, and thinking about our next steps from here on forward. Background Okay, then - what brought us here?

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