Posts

More Securely Access an HTTP Request Trigger

Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels In a previous post, we learned how to trigger a Power Automate flow by calling an HTTP endpoint. The best part of this trigger is that it allows you to trigger your flow from anywhere on the internet, be it an application or right in your browser. The trouble is, there isn’t security for that endpoint “out of the box”. Anyone who knows the endpoint’s URI can call it. So how do you secure that endpoint so that only someone who is authorized to call the endpoint can get it to run?

Thursday, May 6, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

Using an HTTP Request Trigger

Request by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images This time around we’re going to talk about the HTTP request trigger. This is one of the automated category of triggers that allows you to trigger a flow to run from an HTTP request. This flow is really handy if you have some data you can put into a JSON schema that you want to process in some way. One example from the templates list is passing in data to the flow to use to create a user in Azure Active Directory.

Friday, April 30, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

C# Advent 2020 - ASP.NET Core API Endpoints

MVC is a mess. Controllers in one folder, views in another, services in another, models and viewmodels in yet other folders. Related files are all over the place. Trying to piece together these related pieces can be a real pain. Steve “ardalis” Smith has come up with another way: ASP.NET Core API Endpoints. The concept is a simple one. Everything that’s related can easily be put in one folder, maybe even in one file. Steve explains much better: “Instead of Model-View-Controller (MVC) the pattern becomes Request-EndPoint-Response (REPR). The REPR (reaper) pattern is much simpler and groups everything that has to do with a particular API endpiont together.” By putting everything together, maintenance and development are all much easier. As Steve notes, this is a concept that the .NET team has done in creating Razor pages.

Saturday, December 19, 2020 | 6 minutes Read

Gulp Build Not Working In Visual Studio But Works On Command Line

I’ve been working quite a bit with a project recently that uses gulp to build the CSS and JavaScript files in Visual Studio from the Task Runner Explorer. Recently, this build suddenly stopped working and I couldn’t figure out why. It ran just fine from the command prompt, but in Task Runner Explorer, it threw all kinds of errors. This is an older project and requires an older version of NodeJs and gulp to be installed.

Thursday, August 20, 2020 | 2 minutes Read

Azure Hybrid Connections To Local IIS Server Not Connecting

I found myself needing to create an Azure Hybrid connection from a web application hosted on Azure to a WebAPI application hosting on a server inside a company network. I kept running into one issue that was preventing me from successfully creating my connection. If you find, like me, that no matter what you try, your Hybrid connection just keeps telling you “Not Connected”, there’s one thing you should check in your installed Windows Features list.

Saturday, January 25, 2020 | 1 minute Read

The Nightmare Before Blazor

Boys and girls of every age Wouldn’t you like to see something strange? Come with me and you will see This, C# in WebAssembly This is Blazor, this is Blazor C# in my browser, what a sight This is Blazor, C# devs in WebAssembly C# in my browser, what a sight This post is part of the 2019 C# Advent. Check out all the amazing posts here.

Friday, December 13, 2019 | 11 minutes Read

Join me at the AXUG UserGroupSummit

If you work with Microsoft Dynamics, then User Group Summit North America in October is the one conference that you really need to attend. And this year’s conference will be something extra special. Why? Because I’ll be speaking! Come and see my co-worker Pi-Jou Lin and I during the eXtreme365 portion of the event as we share some fantastic ways to utilize the power of Flow to make your Dynamics 365 lives better. While we’ll be focusing on Flow and D365 F&O, the principals apply to any of the cloud versions of Dynamics.

Friday, September 6, 2019 | 1 minute Read

Tagging Images with Flow and Azure Vision API - Part I

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash This time, in our continuing adventures with Microsoft Flow and the Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision API, we’re using the Vision API to tag image files. The flow will pass the Vision API image files from OneDrive and update the image files with the list of auto-generated meta tags the service returns to us.

Monday, August 5, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Flow and Azure Cognitive Services Vision Service-OCR

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels Last time we looked at generating thumbnail images via the Vision Service. This time we’re going to look at using the service to get text out of a photograph of a document utilizing the the Vision Service’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. Button, Button We’re going to use a Flow button trigger from the Flow phone app to start this flow. In Microsoft Flow, select New -> Instant - From blank. Give it a name and select “From Microsoft Flow”.

Thursday, August 1, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Flow and Azure Cognitive Services Vision Service-Thumbnails

In the past, I’ve played around with some pieces of Azure Cognitive Services surrounding text recognition. Over the next couple of posts, I’m going to take a look at some things you can do with the Vision Service and ways we can integrate that with Flow. For this first post, we’re going to use the Vision service to create a thumbnail of our image. There are any number of reasons that you might want to generate thumbnail images for a file. One example would be a company that is putting together an online product catalog or online store. For most situations like this, every product will need one or more full size images and a thumbnail to match each one. For example, when you look at a product on Amazon, there will be a series of thumbnail images along the left side of the product page. Hovering over or clicking on an image will display the full size version.

Monday, July 29, 2019 | 6 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow: Converting Feed Categories to Hashtags

In a number of previous posts starting with this one, I’ve covered ways to use Microsoft Flow to post to to your Twitter and LinkedIn feeds when you publish a blog post. One thing I haven’t covered in those posts is doing something with your categories. This time, we’ll walk through adding steps to our flow to convert the categories from our blog post into hashtags for our Twitter and LinkedIn posts.

Thursday, July 25, 2019 | 3 minutes Read

Remember to initialize your Dynamics 365 Retail RCSU

I was running into an issue setting up a Dynamics 365 FO Retail Point of Sale in a UAT environment for a client and was running into all sorts of weird problems and errors. Things would work sometimes, but more often would just fail for what seemed like nonsensical reasons. Digging into each error seemed to lead me in circles. Having taken over this deployment from another developer I made the (faulty) assumption about some of the initial setup that had taken place.

Tuesday, July 23, 2019 | 1 minute Read