Posts from 2021

Posts from 2021 (60)

• 

  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

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• 

  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!

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• 

  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?

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• 

  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?

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• 

  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.

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• 

  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.

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• 

  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".

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• 

  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.

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• 

  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!

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• 

  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!

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• 

  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!

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• 

  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.

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• 

  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!

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• 

  Published on

  2021-10-05 3:12 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  azurefunctionscosmosdb

  ILogger binding suddenly failing for Azure Functions - what to do?

  This article explains another fun issue that you might run into when developing Azure Functions in your local environment. It was weird how unclear the few results were that I could find. And the issue is just... very hazy in general. But I was able to track the issue down, and thought I'd document the solution :) It's for myself, really, because I'm pretty sure I'll run into this one again. But if you find it useful, good for you! 😉 Problem So what is it that is failing?

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• 

  Published on

  2021-09-28 6:57 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  code-firstentityframeworkcore

  "dotnet ef script" or "Script-Migration" producing empty .sql files?

  Another day, another issue. This time, I was absent-mindedly following the guidance for a project on how to generate .sql files for .NET EF Core code-first migrations. Don't ask why that was required, but it was. My migration was simple. Adding an entity with just a few properties. And Entity Framework created my programmatic migration just fine. But when generating the SQL file, I got nothing but an empty file.

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• 

  Published on

  2021-09-20 10:41 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  iison-premisesreactwebconfig

  How to fix a 403.18 in a virtual application?

  Another day, another issue - this time with an on-premises environment with a ridiculously complicated architecture and an absolute ton of pipelines. There are plenty of ways to fix this particular issue (because there are plenty of reasons), and after ferocious googling (and a very brief binging just to see if Microsoft had found something Google hadn't), the trail ran cold and I felt like nobody had run into the same issue before.

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• 

  Published on

  2021-09-15 4:22 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  github

  GitHub Action fails with "The GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable was not set"

  Another day, another thing that I am trying to do on GitHub (and partially failing), and another blog post! This time I was configuring a build and ran into trouble. This article describes one possible fix to an issue where an error is thrown along the lines of "The GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable was not set".

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• 

  Published on

  2021-09-07 5:53 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  youtubedl

  How to download audio files from Vidyard

  Today, I'm documenting a simple way to download audio files from Vidyard. This approach only works for files that aren't password-protected or behind authentication - I don't think you can use it easily for nefarious stuff, but just in case you're trying to commit some kind of IP theft (intellectual property), please don't. And definitely do not ask for instructions in the comments section :) Anyway - why did I take up this task? What did I want to achieve, in order to need... This?

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• 

  Published on

  2021-08-31 6:44 p.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  gitvscode

  Visual Studio Code fails when running "git pull" for a new project

  This article describes a simple fix to an issue (well... One or many possible issues), where git fails to pull anything from remote, throwing instead an error somewhat like this: fatal: no such branch: 'master' Bah. This stops you from pulling any new changes from remote, and likewise, it will stop you from pushing your new stuff out there. Always something going wrong with git, right? But what is the reason this time exactly? Problem So there I was, just following a guide on docs.microsoft.com.

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• 

  Published on

  2021-08-24 4:11 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  ms-sql-serversqlsql-query

  How to form a parameterized SQL query to find duplicates in a table.

  So one day, I needed to quickly check if an identity field in a view in a Microsoft SQL Server was actually unique or not. I was running into weird issues with Entity Framework throwing an error somewhat like this: Store update, insert, or delete statement affected an unexpected number of rows (2) Or somewhat like this: Type: DbUpdateConcurrencyExceptionStore update, insert, or delete statement affected an unexpected number of rows ([row count]).

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• 

  Published on

  2021-08-17 4:25 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcorejsonnetcore

  How to serialize to JSON in camelCase using .NET Core?

  This article describes how to configure your .NET Core application to serialize objects in camelCase instead of PascalCase. I guess this is another quick note - something that should be simple, but I couldn't remember how to do it from the top of my head, and the solution turned out to be a bit unintuitive. I guess that makes it worth documenting because I'll definitely run into this again. Anyway - let's take a closer look at the actual issue at hand, shall we?

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• 

  Published on

  2021-08-12 4:29 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  homeassistantlovelace

  Home Assistant - Quick and dirty fixes

  This article documents the quick and dirty fixes and patches that I have found for Home Assistant. I'm trying to document all the things that are not complicated enough to warrant an actual blog post themselves somewhere, and this page is as good a place as any. Hopefully, these tips end up being helpful to someone else as well!

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• 

  Published on

  2021-08-10 3:58 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  asp-netdotnetwebsockets

  How to secure your WebSocket connection using .NET Core?

  This article explains how to easily authenticate your WebSocket connections using .NET Core and vanilla JavaScript. The same concept probably applies to all sorts of front-end libraries, although some of them might offer some syntactic sugar on top of it. But it's simple, and keeping your implementation simple is generally speaking a good idea. So - this one came up when developing a simple API that'd expose a WebSocket endpoint for seamless notifications to the Web UI.

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• 

  Published on

  2021-08-05 2:07 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  climacellhomeassistant

  No way to renew a ClimaCell API subscription - what to do?

  One day I suddenly realized that my Home Assistant's ClimaCell integration had stopped working. That was weird - it had been running just fine for a while. I had signed up for a ClimaCell developer account at developer.tomorrow.io (or whatever the address was before rebranding from ClimaCell to Tomorrow.io - but this is the portal that I used) on the 28th of July, perhaps in 2020, or perhaps 2019. And it had worked brilliantly so far, but suddenly and without warning, it just stopped working.

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• 

  Published on

  2021-07-27 4:51 a.m.

  Authors

  koskila

  Tags

  aspnetcorenetcorewebsockets

  HttpContext.WebSockets.IsWebSocketRequest always null in .NET Core?

  This article explains another simple fix to an annoying issue. I guess that's how I start most of my little tutorials, but hey, it's true! I suppose I just have a knack for running into issues that come with poorly documented fixes or workarounds that are obvious but only in hindsight... Right? Anyway, this time my WebSocket requests were not being handled as such by my ASP.NET Controllers. "IsWebSocketRequest" was suggested by IntelliSense, but it would always be null in the code.

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