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All Posts (543)

• 

  Published on

  2019-12-04 9:47 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsyaml

  How to find out which WebDriver version is installed on an Azure DevOps build machine using YAML?

  Uh, okay, well. So this is where you should just RTFM (that's along the lines of "check the documentation" for those uninitiated in the world of unnecessary abbreviations). But as we've found out before, Microsoft's documentation on the agent's installed software isn't always up-to-date . That's why I added this simple snippet on my pipeline to figure out which version of the browser AND the webdriver are installed on the machine.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-28 5:21 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  delvedelveblogsoffice-365pnppowershell

  How do you migrate your Delve Blogs content to Modern SharePoint?

  You might've heard the news - Delve Blogs are on the way out, leaving your users without a blogging platform on Office 365, and their data homeless. And by homeless, I mean deleted pretty soon. And by pretty soon I mean really soon. Might be a good time to start thinking about storing it somewhere else instead!

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-27 6:18 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  delvedelveblogsoffice-365pnppowershell

  How to export your Delve blogs content?

  The news is out - Delve Blogs will be axed, leaving your users without a blogging platform on Office 365, and their data homeless. And by homeless, I mean deleted. Might be a good time to start thinking about storing it somewhere else instead! This post is the second post in my impromptu, Delve Blogs -themed blog series: Part 1: Delve Blogs getting deprecated – what do? Part 2: How to export your Delve blogs content?

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-26 8:29 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  delvedelveblogsmicrosoftoffice-365

  Delve Blogs getting deprecated - what do?

  Last week, Microsoft sent a surprise email to a number of customers. Delve blogs - the hated & loved self-serve internal blogging platform on Office 365 is getting axed. It doesn't really come as a surprise at this point - the service was first announced in 2014, and launched to some hype and appreciation (especially due to the new CMS - authoring canvas - which was a lot of fun compared to Classic SharePoint!) but has pretty much faded away after that.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-26 4:07 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azure-admsdn

  "Unable to service request" when trying to log into a Microsoft website

  Okay - so this one is going to be a simple blog post. I'll be explaining an apparent fan favorite! Namely, MSDN forums , MSDN subscriber downloads or other Microsoft web properties are not letting you sign in, but rather throw the following error: Unable to service request Why do you get an error like this? How to resolve it? Background

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-25 1:06 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  mvpawardmvpbuzz

  Awarded MVP for Office Development

  Late Friday night a couple of weeks ago, I got an interesting and a bit surprising email from Microsoft. Flabbergasted, I tweeted this right after: Wait, WHAT? First of all, when did #Microsoft learn to write proper Finnish, second of all, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? :D I'm genuinely at a loss of words. Just... Thanks everyone for sparring and pushing me - I'll do my best to be worthy of y'alls trust! 🤩 #MVPBuzz #MVP pic.twitter.com/wn3EMKfrvA — Antti K.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-21 8:48 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  cnetcorenetcore3nuget

  How to solve 'DbContextOptionsBuilder' does not contain a definition for 'UseSqlServer' error in .NET Core?

  This is another, kind of a classic and simple solution to a fairly simple problem: How to fix it, when your DbContextOptionsBuilder fails to take in your connection string and complains about UseSqlServer missing or whatever? AI-powered summary: Efficiently Solve ‘DbContextOptionsBuilder’ Error in .NET Core The ‘DbContextOptionsBuilder’ error in .NET Core arises when setting up DbContext. The ‘UseSqlServer’ method is not found during the build. The solution is to add the ‘Microsoft.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-19 1:22 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcoreazure-adnetcore

  Iterating Group memberships using Claims in .NET Core

  Another case, where there's plenty of documentation, but it just doesn't seem to be comprehensive enough or just doesn't apply for any of the cases that I have - for whatever reason. Maybe my cases are wrong, or I'm just bad at googling, but I've struggled to find a good page documenting this. Perfect case for another blog post about the topic, then - perhaps someone else will find it useful! This post answers the question: How to get Claims for a user in .NET Core?

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-13 12:58 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  blazorie11netcore3

  IE11 fails to load a (server-side) Blazor web app

  Welp - this was not a fun issue to run into! While nobody in this day and age should use Internet Explorer for any normal usage (occasional legacy scenarios aside), there are still some luddites who do (or whose IT department makes them to). This means it's still useful, and sometimes even required, for a web application to work even in Internet Explorer.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-11 1:19 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  entityframeworkcorenetcorenetcore3

  How to create a DbContext from just a connection string?

  When you're in your .NET Core project, it's always easy: you just register your DbContext in ConfigureServices, and then inject it into whichever Page, View or Controller you might need it in. However, when you have another project or solution you're working on and you'd still like to use the same DbContext and your entity classes in it, you have to find another way to do it! What should we do, then? Description Let's first take a look at the use cases and tech stack.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-11-01 9:17 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  hacktoberfesthacktoberfest19matblazormicrosoftdocs

  Another year, another Hacktoberfest (2019)!

  As a lot of the more frequent readers of this blog know, I generally work on proprietary - that is, non-open-source - projects. Whenever I do have some time to dabble in OSS, it's usually for a hobby. This time around, I've been really struggling to find the time to contribute to open-source projects. Last year I had just had a baby - so it's not like I was sleeping anyway.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-10-29 10:24 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  gitgithubyaml

  How to resolve "refusing to allow an integration to create or update .github/workflows/main.yml" on GitHub Desktop?

  This article explains how to fix a weird and surprising error about GitHub Actions workflow file thrown at you when you try to push your changes using GitHub Desktop. The odd part is that you had no changes to the workflow file at all. Problem Ran into this one when trying to push my merge from upstream. I was adhering to my own instructions (see below for a link), but got the error (further below) that stopped me from using GitHub Desktop to push (sync) at all.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-10-25 11:31 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azureazuredevopsrobotframework

  How to use the right version of the WebDriver on hosted agents in Azure DevOps?

  We were working on getting our Robot Framework tests running during our builds on Azure DevOps. However, using hosted agents, it was quite a struggle to get all of the dependencies on the agent and make sure the tests could access the browser on the build machine. In our case, we were running the tests in Chrome. For this, we needed Robot Framework and some of its dependencies to be installed on the machine.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-10-24 12:55 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsdevopsmsbuild

  EF Core fails to load hostpolicy.dll when RuntimeIdentifier is win-x86

  I ran into another interesting one when working with a .NET Core 3.0 project and Entity Framework Core - this time, RuntimeIdentifier configuration causing trouble. In short, running Update-Database (to apply code-first migrations to your local database) locally would return this, annoying error: Failed to load the dll from [runtimepath]\win-x86\hostpolicy.dll], HRESULT: 0x800700C1 An error occurred while loading required library hostpolicy.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-10-22 9:51 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcorenetcore3visual-studiovisualstudio2019

  How to fix "The type or namespace name 'Services' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components' (are you missing an assembly reference?)"

  I have just resolved a random issue that's difficult enough to google so I thought it would be worth documenting! These seem to be popping up whenever you work with anything that's fairly fresh out of the oven... This particular case revolves around Visual Studio being incredibly obnoxious and starting to throw a ton of errors on code that worked five minutes prior. In my case, the error happened after updates to Visual Studio. Always fun. Symptoms The errors started popping up in Visual Studio.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-10-17 12:22 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsdevopsnugetyaml

  Azure DevOps - how to package a single DLL?

  Okay - a quick piece of documentation that was a bit lackluster, so it's again a good idea to log somewhere. How to package a simple DLL that's a result of your Azure DevOps Pipeline? In my particular case, I have configured a post-build step to obfuscate the DLL, that's first built by MSBuild. That works nicely.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-10-17 9:43 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcoreblazornetcorenetcore3

  How to use UriHelper or NavigationManager in .NET Core 3.0 & Blazor?

  Just a quick piece of documentation, as this piece of code, has changed in different versions of .NET Core 3.0 so far a few times. Need to have things like this written down somewhere! UriHelper / NavigationManager with .NET Core 3.0 Both of these helper libraries do essentially the same thing: navigate/browse/redirect the user to a different address, component, page or view in or by your web app.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-10-16 11:23 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azuredevopsmsbuild

  Azure DevOps build fails with "The nuget command failed with exit code(1) and error(Cannot determine the packages folder to restore NuGet packages."

  -_PublishedWebSites ------ArtifactName ------bin,content,scripts,views.... folders and ------Web.config, Web.Debug.config and Web.Release.config ----ArtifactName.zip ----NugetPackagedll1 ----NugetPackagedll2 ----NugetPackagedll3 .... ----NugetPackagedll_300 So, I am not sure why I am getting these many contents in the output?

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• 

  Published on

  2019-10-09 10:15 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcoreblazornetcorenetcore3

  HttpClient in Blazor

  Blazor is a new (ish) framework for building web UIs with C#. It either uses SignalR to manage connections between your client-side and server-side code or even compiles directly to WebAssembly, in both cases cutting out the need to write any pesky JavaScript yourself - pretty neat, if you ask me! However, developing your web apps with Blazor is a bit different from using ASP.NET MVC, for example.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-09-10 10:19 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  applicationinsightsazuremonitorazureregion

  List of Azure Regions, where Application Insights is available

  This article describes the Azure regions, where Azure Monitor Application Insights is available. Azure regions A region is a set of data centres deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network. Depending on who's talking, regions are sometimes called locations, geolocations or just geos. Azure regions give customers the flexibility to deploy their applications where they need to.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-09-04 10:24 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  asp-netcmvcmvc5

  How to get the Description for a property in ASP.NET MVC 5?

  This post describes the easiest way to show description texts for properties in ASP.NET MVC 5. Sounds simple, right? We can use something like @Html.DescriptionFor(x => x.Property) , right? Alas, it's not that straightforward. A bit surprisingly, there's no ready-made helper function for this. I'm saying "surprisingly", because I feel like MVC 5 really already has all the bells and whistles - AND the kitchen sink.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-08-27 11:48 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcoreef-coreentityframeworkcore

  How to add creator/modified info to all of your EF models at once in .NET Core

  This is a tip that should often be the first thing you do in your projects with database backend, no matter which technology you use: Add some basic info about modified and created times, and the user information - so that if something happens, everyone will know who to blame 😉 There are a lot of great blog articles describing how to do this in .NET Framework, but not that many for .NET Core. It's very similar, but not the same. I learned that by copy-pasting code from the former to the latter.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-08-23 7:36 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  centityframeworkentityframeworkcore

  EF Core returns null for a Navigation property

  This article describes how to fix a situation, where you can't use any of the navigation properties of your Entity Framework Core entities, since they are all null, despite data being in the database for sure. So, another day, another error. This time I can't blame SharePoint, since I just messed up with ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core. :) Symptoms No matter what I'd do, I was getting null values for my navigation properties on my entities.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-08-19 8:18 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  blazornetcorenetcore3razor

  '__generated__Index.OnInitAsync()': no suitable method found to override

  Welp - just ran into this one, and as I expect others to encounter the same issue, I'd better document it right away! So in Blazor, I was crafting a simple component that'd display some data in a nice way. Being lazy and crafty, I thought I'd copy-paste some similar code from an earlier POC I had built since I knew it worked. The component was overriding a method called "OnInitAsync", and it just nicely fetched data after initialisation. But alas, it didn't. Not anymore.

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• 

  Published on

  2019-08-16 7:54 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  canadaexpatmontrealexpat

  Au revoir Canada, bonjour Finland.. Eh?

  Is this seriously my first ACTUAL post about Canada? What a major gap in my content! However, living in Canada has been fairly hectic (with the work, family and trips), so I haven't been able to write much about our life here - unlike when we were living in the States . Which, conveniently, brings me to the main point of this rambling - This post works as an announcement of sorts: I'm wrapping up my life in Canada, and moving back to Finland.

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