Development

Flow & Function Together - CS Advent

For this year’s #csadvent post, I am going to continue my posts about using Microsoft Flow to make our lives easier. This time, we’re adding in some Azure Functions as well. In a previous post, I covered creating a Flow that an attendee to a conference might create to watch for tweets that they might want to re-tweet. This time, we want to take on the role of conference organizers who want to watch the flow of tweets for how positive or negative people feel about our conference.

Monday, December 17, 2018 | 11 minutes Read

It is Time For App Security Questions To Die

One of the worst, most annoying, and inept security practices to evolve in online applications over the years is the process of security questions and answers for logging in and/or password & account recovery. They’re annoying, vague and restricted and they absolute must die, die, die! So let’s take a few minutes to examine what’s wrong with security questions. They Aren’t Secure Even if you’re certain of what the answers are, you still have to record the answer somewhere. And that makes them insecure. Why do you have to record them? Because in most instances, your answer must exactly match, character for character, what you originally entered.

Thursday, December 13, 2018 | 7 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Integrating Instagram

(NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) A growing number of people seem to be using Instagram as their primary social media platform. It works well and is quite simple, without a lot of the extra baggage that Facebook and other platforms add. So long as your primary content is image based, it’s great at what it does. In this post, I’m going to be covering a couple of excellent ways to get started with integrating Microsoft Flow with Instagram.

Monday, December 10, 2018 | 5 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Retweet Posts on Approval

Photo by Ian Turnell from Pexels (NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) There’s a lot you can do with Microsoft Flow and implementing the approval action. This will allow you to put in a process to control any Flow you want to. Most of the sample approval templates in Flow are focused around business processes. In this post, however, we’re going to cover the following scenario:

Monday, December 10, 2018 | 6 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - ICYMI, the Easier Way

(NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) Last time I walked through a more complex way to implement a roll your own ‘In Case You Missed It’ Flow for retweeting Twitter posts linking to new blog articles. It wasn’t the way I would do it, but the point was more to show you a few things you can do in Microsoft Flow.

Monday, November 26, 2018 | 6 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - ICYMI, the Hard Way

(NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) One of the promotion methods that many bloggers employ with Twitter is to re-tweet their previous blog post tweets with an “In Case You Missed It” (#ICYMI) tag a few hours or days later. In this blog post, and the next one, I’m going to show you a couple of ways you can implement this in Microsoft Flow.

Thursday, November 22, 2018 | 8 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Convert Links to Short URLs with Bit.ly

In my last post, I showed you how to create a Flow that would promote a new blog post on Twitter and LinkedIn. Given the character limits on Twitter, you may run into issues where your tweet has too many characters and your Flow will fail. The quickest way to address that is to convert the link to the blog post into a short URL using the Bit.ly connector.

Monday, November 19, 2018 | 2 minutes Read

Using Microsoft Flow to Promote A New Ghost Blogging Platform Post

UPDATE: I’ve since abandoned Ghost and gone back to WordPress, but the concepts here apply equally and the Flow will actually work without any modifications for WordPress blogs. (NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) Flow is Microsoft’s answer to IFTTT and Zapier and similar services. These services automate certain online tasks based on various triggers. In the case we’re examining today, we’re going to automate the following requirement:

Saturday, November 17, 2018 | 7 minutes Read

Using C# and Azure Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis To Respond To Customer Complaints

I’m a dev. I just make apps. I only deal with customers when something breaks and my support teams can’t fix it. They’re just an annoyance, right? Wrong. I’m going to show you how Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis can help you retain customers and look good while you’re doing it. Anyone who has worked in a customer service related field will tell you that it’s far less expensive to keep an existing customer happy than it is to win a new customer to your product or service. This is an unavoidable fact and yet so many companies get it wrong. They put little effort into their existing customers until it is too late. Another fact is that all of these customers have friends and social media accounts of their own. And they will share that experience, be it good or bad, to the detriment or glorious success of your company. One lost existing customer is 100 customers who will never even give your product a try. One mad customer that you’ve made happy and kept around is 10 potentially new customers who will be willing to give you a try. (Yeah, I know, people complain far more than they praise. We’re funny like that.)

Saturday, June 16, 2018 | 8 minutes Read

The Problem with StackOverflow/StackExchange

The StackExchange sites are a collection of websites on various topics where people can ask questions and get answers from members of that community. People can also up-vote or down-vote both the questions and the answers, as well as add comments regarding either. People receive ranking points, called “reputation”, for asking questions and on how many up-votes/down-votes their questions and answers receive. It’s intended to drive an active (and interactive) community of people around each subject area. The first and most popular of the sites is StackOverflow.

Thursday, May 3, 2018 | 10 minutes Read

"Visual Studio debugging - SSL Connection / Connection Reset with IISExpress - Stack Overflow

Sometimes it can be a huge pain in the rear to work with SSL on local IIS or IIS Express in Visual Studio. I was trying to debug an issue with my authentication flow and just could not get my auth server to run locally. I finally came across this StackOverflow answer and discovered that I was running into the issue where my port for IIS Express was something like 66234. I didn’t know that to get it to work right, you have set the port between 44300 and 44398. And like Jason’s answer, absolutely nothing I could see either during setup or runtime told me that.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018 | 1 minute Read

C# Advent Calendar 2017 - Using C# and Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics to Identify and Relate Text Documents

One of the tasks that developers sometimes face in large companies (or even small ones) is trying to figure out how large sets of data relate to each other. If that data is text based, C# and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics functions make this extremely easy to accomplish. In this post, I’ll walk through identifying language and parsing out key words and phrases that we can use to help match blocks of text together.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017 | 11 minutes Read