Development

More Fun with images

I thought it would be fun to try another experiment with images. I came across a post on Buzzfeed the other day. You know the kind of posts they do, where they steal images from other websites, and string them together into an inane article while barely giving credit to the source in tiny little letters? This article was about funny posts on Facebook Marketplace, where people are selling things, but aren’t quite sure how they’re spelled.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024 | 2 minutes Read

How do I get started with Power Automate?

When I speak at conferences or user groups about Power Automate, one of the questions I get asked the most (aside from how to understand the confusing licensing), is how to get started with Power Automate, or the Power Platform in general. I thought I would write a post on the best ways to get started. Microsoft Learn In recent years Microsoft has invested heavily in creating free online training for a great many of their products. And most of that learning can be found on the Microsoft Learn site. The modules are the individual courses and the learning paths group several modules together into a cohesive learning track. For Power Automate, there are a few learning paths that I want to highlight.

Tuesday, February 6, 2024 | 5 minutes Read

2023 Festive Tech Calendar - Soft Skills for Developers

Here is my contribution to the 2023 Festive Tech Calendar. It’s a video on the importance of soft skills for developers. It’s an area that we, as a whole, aren’t great at. And we could really use some improvement. Check it out. Maybe some of the tips will help you. Also, Festive Tech Calendar this year is calling for donations to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Please contribute!!

Wednesday, December 27, 2023 | 1 minute Read

AI Still Has A Major Problem With Race and Gender

AI has a serious problem. Ok, it’s got a lot of problems. It’s not a panacea that will solve all the issues that business, or the world, faces. Neither is it Skynet or the world ending evil super AI Tom Cruise goes off to battle. It has great potential for both good and ill, but it’s still a long way from either. And yes, I know what I’m going to point out in this post is nothing new. But I felt I needed to add to the voices calling out some of it’s greatest deficiencies. In this particular case, I’m talking about sexism and racism.

Thursday, December 21, 2023 | 4 minutes Read

2023 C# Advent - What's New in Entity Framework Core 8

This video is my contribution to the 2023 C# Advent event. It’s a highlight of some of the cool new features available in Entity Framework Core 8. Be sure to check out all the other contributions!

Wednesday, December 13, 2023 | 1 minute Read

Copilot for Power Automate

Tis the season of copilots! Everybody gets a copilot! Image by DCStudio on Freepik No, not that kind of copilot. I’m talking about the kind of copilot that runs off of AI and helps you to do some kind of task. You know, all the copilots that Microsoft has recently announced that are getting added to literally EVERYTHING.

Wednesday, November 29, 2023 | 7 minutes Read

Using C# and Power Automate To Sync An Outlook Calendar

There are some good tools out there for syncing your Outlook calendar to other calendars, especially for O365 or Outlook.com calendars. And they’re well worth the money for the good ones. But sometimes, in certain circumstances (such as if you have an on-prem exchange server that you can’t access from the cloud), you just need a quick and dirty tool to copy calendar events from a local Outlook instance to another calendar. That’s something you can do pretty quickly with a little C# and some Power Automate.

Friday, April 14, 2023 | 12 minutes Read

Automatically Adding Travel Time To Your Calendar

Even in this world of video meetings on Teams, Zoom, or wherever, there are still occasions when you need to travel to an onsite meeting somewhere. In these cases, it can be useful to automatically block out travel time before and after to ensure that your calendar reflects when you’re not going to be in the office. Power Automate makes it easy to add some travel time to your calendar.

Friday, March 10, 2023 | 7 minutes Read

What's The Deal With ChatGPT

ChatGPT is all the rage right now. People are using it for all kinds of things, both good and bad. It seems every day there is a new article or story about it and how people are using it. And most of those stories have a fairly negative connotation to them. A mental health company experimented with using it to respond to patients seeking help. Universities and high schools are freaking out, or giving in, because students are using it to write papers. It even passed (barely) exams from business and law schools.

Tuesday, January 31, 2023 | 11 minutes Read

Creating a Check-in Reminder App

This post was inspired by a recent tweet from Taylor Desseyn. app idea here.... a networking tool where instead of social media/linkedin you plug in a persons info and the app reminds you to check in with folks every 30 days — taylor desseyn (@tdesseyn) December 14, 2022 So what we’re going to do is create a pair of Power Platform tools to help us do exactly that. First, we’re going to need a Power App that we can use to maintain a list of people we want to keep in touch with. The second piece will create a scheduled flow in Power Automate that will run daily, determine who we need to catch up with, and then send us that list of people, along with quick links.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023 | 7 minutes Read

Turning Any JSON API Into An App

The Internet is fantastic. There are a seemingly infinite array of APIs available for people to use. Many of them are completely free and open to use in pretty much any way you want to. For example, NASA has a wide variety of things available through its public API. I use one of them in Power Automate with a custom connector to post their daily image to Twitter. For my contribution to this year’s C# Advent, I will demonstrate how easily you can implement any JSON-based API into a C# based application.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 | 9 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2022

I’m participating in the Advent of Code again this year. We’ll see if I get further than I did last year, which was about halfway before I quit. You can follow my progress in my GitHub repo over here. As usual, my solutions are written in C#.

Wednesday, December 7, 2022 | 1 minute Read