March 18, 2022

Lookup Person Field in Power Automate

Hello Citizen Developers!

I get more and more questions about Power Automate. One of the recent questions is about how to look up a person field from SharePoint using Power Automate. I’ll give you a bit of the background in a second. Power Automate is really awesome for citizen developers. There are a lot of triggers and actions that are easy to understand and use, such as send email, create a list item in Sharepoint etc. But there are also techier, nerdier actions that are less citizen developer friendly. One of them is Send an HTTP Request to SharePoint. It might be the answer to many challenges, intimidating at first, but powerful and, hopefully, not so complicated once you’ve tried it. This post is about this very action and how you can use it to simplify your flow.

February 23, 2022

Automatically Send Email When News Is Published

News in SharePoint are great, it is easy to edit and post news, add pictures and web parts. But you might have thought how you would spread the word better. If your workmates would check the start page on your site or on the SharePoint Home every day, it would be awesome, it might be the case in future. In the meantime though, you probably have considered sending out email notifications to your workmates whenever there is fresh news.

February 21, 2022

Automate Creation of Git Repos Using Azure DevOps API

Today I got a question: how can we precreate 50 git repositories in an Azure DevOps Project? I started to learn about the API in Azure DevOps and I found it very interesting. With the API you can script and automate administration of projects, repositores, pull requests etc. To keep this blog post simple and digestable I would like to focus on the intitial request - creating git repositories by code.

February 15, 2022

11 Things I learned about chat bots in Teams

Recently we developed and published a chat bot in Power Virtual Agents for Teams (PVAforTeams). I would like to share my takes and lessons learned with you.

#1 Easy to edit, fun to work with

Bots in PVAforTeams are no-code solutions and provide a comprehensive graphical interface. Developers, analysts, business representatives can work together on defining topics, user flows. It has been really fun to shape the bot in a group - with a lot of laughter and interesting discussions about users’ work habits and how users search and find information. This is how the simplest topic looks like: Greeting:

December 20, 2021

My WSL Setup

This is my installation of Windows WSL and SharePoint Development Environment. The procedure and technology is ever-changing, the details might change, but the process is worth documenting, at least for myself, this is a working guide as of writing (2021-12-20).

Installing Windows Terminal

Installing Windows Terminal is not a prerequisite, but it will make your life much easier. Open Windows Store and search for Windows Terminal and click on Install.

Installing WSL 2

Installing WSL has never been easier than now. For that you only need to run a command in terminal as an Administrator and restart your computer:

December 15, 2021

Export AppendOnly Comments

Remember the old comments in SharePoint Lists? I am sure there are tons of lists that use the Append-Only Comments. They are implemented using versioning. The problem is that it is hard to export the comments, unless you know the tricks. The trick I want to share comes from a colleague of mine. The reason why we need export all the comments is that we need to document and save/archive the decision making process that took place in the comments field.

December 8, 2021

New Home for My Blog

Hello World

Now I have moved my blog. chuvash.eu is a static site. I’ll share more details and insights later.

Update 2022-02-10

It has passed a few months since the move from Wordpress to a static site. Now it is time to summarize the insights.

Why I moved

Here are the reasons why I switched from Wordpress.com to a static site

To be honest, the main reason was that I was curious about static sites.
It appealed to me to have a fast and secure website (because there is no database that slows down or gets hacked).
I finally got rid of the annoying ads from Wordpress.com. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate Wordpress.com, as a matter of fact, I sacrified some really neat functions (such as the comments and the community) when moving to a static, but on that later.
It finally got free from the vendor lock-in. Now I have all my blog posts as markdown files in a git repository. I can build them to any static website or even consume as they are, no fiddling with a database (if it were a own hosted wordpress site). I find it also easier to collaborate on my blog posts since I can grant access to the git repository to people I want to work together with.
Speaking of git, now I have real version history of my content, no more accidential deletions.

Well, there might be more reasons, but these are the most important ones.

October 20, 2021

A powershell script for activating an eligible role assignment in Azure AD

Recently my role assignments in Azure AD were switched from permanent to eligible ones. This is part of PIM - Privileged Identity Management, you can read more about it on MS Docs:

Start using Privileged Identity Management

To activate your eligible assignment you can use Azure Portal, Graph API, and PowerShell. The activation in the portal and Graph API is described on MS Docs:

Activate my Azure AD roles in PIM

June 17, 2021

Sites.Selected and Governance

The new permission in Graph API - Sites.Selected - is a step in the right direction. Since long we have been looking for ways of scoping the accesses to live up to the least privilege principle. It was either nothing or everything. I have tried out the new Sites.Selected permission and here are my findings.

First of all, if you haven’t heard about Sites.Selected, please visit these pages to find out more. I am skipping the introduction, since there are already good resources on that out there.

June 2, 2021

Smarter way of loading SharePoint CSOM dll in PowerShell

Have you also got a legacy powershell script that loads SharePoint dlls and runs CSOM code directly? It’s quite easy to convert to PnP PowerShell. But if you run out of time and just need to execute the script, then I have a quick tip for you.

First of all, a CSOM script can be recognized by Add-Type commands (or Import-Module) plus the SharePoint dll paths.

Loading the dll the old way.