Recently I Became Curious About Discord Bots and How They Work. In this blog post, I am going to write about my learnings. While some parts might be familiar to you, I found it very amusing to start with a simple “Hello, World!” bot, run it locally, deploy it to the cloud, and integrate it with ChatGPT. Along the way, I learned a lot. I hope this post can inspire other people or at least serve as a reference to refresh my memory when I revisit this topic in the future.

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 My roles within Privileged Identity Management in Azure Portal

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.

Have you also got some old huge scripts that run on a server locally? Have you also considered moving them to the cloud? Here comes an idea of how to do it quickly and easy. In my case I have some older powershell scripts that are harder to convert to serverless applications: They use MSOnline module in PowerShell, hence they require rewriting to AzureAD before using them in an Azure Function They take around 15 minutes to complete, Azure Functions Consumption Plan is limited to 10 minutes.

What if you put together Work From Home and Home Automation? Well, removing the common denominator (HOME) would mean Work Automation (sic!). I want to tell you about a tiny hobby project I have had at home, still related to work of mine: Whenever an Azure alert is triggered, my Trådfri smart light from IKEA flashes for a couple of seconds. Summary (if you want to skip the long story below): The solution is a tiny web application.

Azure Alerts are awesome for monitoring of solutions in Azure. If you are about to set up your first Alert Rules in Azure, then it’s a guide for you. Configuring alert rules can be quite intimidating at first, with all the options, metrics, evaluation times, etc. Here is a very very simple setup that can serve as a teaser and help you get started with the Azure Alerts. I’ll use Teams as an easy way to set up notifications.

This is a guide for how to handle secrets in a logic app in a secure way. It combines three resources: Accessing Key Vault from Logic App with Managed Identity Get Secrets Key Vault API Hide your logic apps secrets from prying eyes First, enable a Managed Identity for your Logic App: In the KeyVault, add a new Access Policy for the new Managed Identity (from the previous step). Use the least priviliges.

Instead of filtering values from an Azure Storage Table, you can do it directly in the bindings. It might not be a solution for everything, but in the right place, it is fantastic. I was very surprised to see how little code was needed after this binding change: For that to work, define the filter attribute in the bindings: “filter”: “(PartitionKey eq ‘{package}’)” To try it out, add a new row in a table defined in the bindings (“metadata” in my case):

I have read and followed this awesome post: Getting SPFx working in Visual Studio Online by SPDavid. I got my fingers and tried that guide out. This worked good, I spent some time, though, googling (binging) around to get rid of the SSL Warnings for the remote “localhost” on my Mac. I would like to share this simple instruction on how to trust a self signed certificate from gulp-connect on Mac OS.

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.

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: Resources: Azure Pipelines Predefined Variables Create ASP.NET Core app with React PublishWebProjects must be false

Recently I have looked more at IoT, Raspberry Pi in my spare time. In my blog post I want to share my experience in a series of posts. This post is about measuring temperature, humidity and pressure with Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and Sense Hat and posting this data to Azure Table Storage. I followed this tutorial for connecting to azure with python and these instructions for reading data from Sense Hat.