September 10, 2019

Tips and Trick for Azure Functions

These are my favourite tips and tricks. These are only those who me and my colleguages have tried out.

Architecture tips

Keep it slim

Functions should do one thing and they should do it well. When you develop it in C# and Visual Studio, it is so tempting to develop a “microservice” in a good way, you add interfaces, implement good patterns, and all of a sudden you get a monolith packaged in a microservice. If your function grows, stop, rethink. Better to see how it input and output bindings can be used. Also orchestration with Logic Apps or Durable Functions can help.

September 9, 2019

Switch back to Modern UI

Just a little tip. When you switched to a Classic View of Site Contents, you can switch back by removing a cookie called “splnu”.

August 30, 2019

Update LocaleId and TimeZone with PnP

If you get an error while trying to update Regional Settings on your SharePoint Online Site, then PowerShell combination of PnP and CSOM are to the rescue.

The issue I got was that indexed columns were there. You can try to remove indexed columns and re-add them. But it is not the best solution. In my scenario, it was an indexed column that I couldn’t remove.

	Connect-PnPOnline https://takana16.sharepoint.com/sites/001
	$web = Get-PnPWeb
	$ctx = Get-PnPContext
	$ctx.Load($web.RegionalSettings)
	$ctx.ExecuteQuery()
	$tz = $web.RegionalSettings.TimeZones.GetById(4) # Stockholm, UTC+1
	$web.RegionalSettings.Timezone = $tz
	$web.RegionalSettings.LocaleId = 1053 # Swedish
	$web.RegionalSettings.FirstDayOfWeek = 1 # Monday
	$web.RegionalSettings.Time24 = $true
	$web.Update()
	$ctx.ExecuteQuery()

view raw update-site-locale-pnp.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The reason why I use a combination of PnP and CSOM (Load, Update, ExecuteQuery), is that I have not found a way of updating RegionalSettings in PnP.

August 27, 2019

Tips and tricks for Site Collection App Catalogs

Site Collection App Catalogs (SCAC) are much appreciated, thank you, Office 365 Team. Here is a couple of tips and tricks for SCAC.

Tip #1 You don’t need Tenant Admin rights to add a new Site Collection App Catalog

I have seen many blogs, forum threads etc that state that only Global Tenant Administrators can add new Site Collection App Catalogs. The truth is that a SharePoint Admin rights are enough. The trick is to make that SharePoint Admin Account to a site collection administrator of the app catalog site. To be precise the account that adds a new SCAC must have Manage Web Permissions, as stated in error message:

August 26, 2019

Just because I can should I use Private Office 365 CDN

This is about a topic brought up by Waldek Mastykarz: Just because you can should you use the Office 365 CDN. In my post I want to take a closer look at the private CDN option in Office 365. Please note, the whole thing is subject to change, and it reflects the circumstances at the time of writing - 2019-08-26.

I’ll skip the introduction of Office 365, let’s jump directly to the Private CDN option. Consider following scenarios.

May 9, 2019

Simple Build for dotnet new react

I created a sample ASP.NET Core app with React.

dotnet new react

Then it took a couple of hours to get the build to work. Here is my working azure-pipelines.yml:

	trigger:
	- master

	pool:
	vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

	variables:
	buildConfiguration: 'Release'

	steps:
	- script: dotnet build --configuration $(buildConfiguration)
	displayName: 'dotnet build $(buildConfiguration)'

	- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
	displayName: 'dotnet publish $(buildConfiguration)'
	inputs:
	command: publish
	publishWebProjects: False
	arguments: '--configuration $(BuildConfiguration) --output $(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)'
	zipAfterPublish: True

	- task: PublishBuildArtifacts@1
	displayName: 'publish artifacts'

view raw asp.net-core-react_azure-pipelines.yml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Resources:

April 2, 2019

Svenska i Office 365 Admin

Svenskt gränssnitt i Office 365 är inte självklart. Här är en lista på översättningar som jag stött på som går att härleda, men som inte är helt etablerade i svenskan.

Compliance - efterlevnad
Policy - princip
Retention - kvarhållning

March 6, 2019

My list of _layouts pages

There are many resources on the internet that list _layouts/15 urls in SharePoint. Some are outdated, some are too short, some are to long. Here is my list of the urls, that I am going to update when I need. All the urls start with [Your-Tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/[Your-Site]/_layouts/15/ Here we go:

viewlsts.aspx - Site Contents, Modern View
viewlsts.aspx?view=14 - Site Contents, Classic View
appinv.aspx - Grant Permissions to an App
appregnew.aspx - Register a new SharePoint Application
appprincipals.aspx - List Registered Add-Ins
CreateGroup.aspx - Create Site page (Team and Communication)
TA_AllAppPrincipals.aspx - List all app principals

March 3, 2019

SPFx Samples

Here is my list of repositories that provide examples of SPFx solutions.

SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-webparts is a comprehensive collection of webparts and tutorials
Puzzlepart/spfx-solutions is an intresting collection of spfx solutions, shared by Mikael Svenson.
To be continued.

September 25, 2018

SwiftKey from the Chuvash point of view

SwiftKey is a keyboard app for iOS and Android, it adds a new virtual keyboard and it provides the Chuvash one among others. Here is my review of Swiftkey from the perspective of a person who writes in Chuvash on the mobile.

Positive things

The fact that it has the Chuvash keyboard map is awesome. There is no official Chuvash keyboard in iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows (well you can add Chuvash, but you won’t get the Chuvash letters). Only Linux has the built-in Chuvash keyboard.
It has a built-in Chuvash dictionary, so that can provide suggestions. It also can learn from your typing. Although there is an issue with the suggestions, see below.
The Chuvash characters with diacritics are right: Unicode and Cyrillic, not their look-alikes from the Latin set. It is important: if people use the same characters, they can find more on Google.

Negative things

Actually I don’t want to call it negative things, many of them are just missing features. I hope with that review I can get in contact with the Swiftkey team and improve the app.