Posts

UPDATE: Microsoft Flow: Posting to LinkedIn

In a previous post, I showed how to post to LinkedIn about a blog post. The connector available at that time used V1 of the LinkedIn API. That version no longer works. Thankfully, Flow already has added support for the LinkedIn V2 API, and it’s a simple swap of steps to replace V2 for V1. Add a new step just below your “Share an article” step. Search for LinkedIn. Make sure you select LinkedIn V2 and not the other one.

Monday, July 22, 2019 | 1 minute Read

Microsoft Flow: Feeding Forms data to Dynamics 365 CRM

One of the most universal pieces of any company website is the “Contact Us” page. There are countless ways this is handled. At the simplest it can just open a mailto link. Sometimes there’s an inline form of some sort that feeds into some app somewhere. A lot of times it will require someone along the process to take the data from that form and copy/paste it into the whatever Customer Relationship Management system the company uses.

Thursday, July 18, 2019 | 5 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow for Expiration Dates pt. 2

In the previous Flow post, I walked through using Flow to set up reminders for things you need to keep track of, like expiration dates, renewal dates and so forth. In this follow up, I’ll walk through creating a weekly process that emails you a list of upcoming reminders so you know what’s coming in the future. Trigger We’ll start by creating a blank Flow. For our Trigger, we’re going to select a Schedule. Search for “Recurrence” and select that. For this example, I’m going to set the trigger to run on Sunday evenings at 6pm local time. That’s the time I’m starting to think about the coming week, so it’s a good time to remind myself of what’s coming up. For my Flow, I’ve selected the following parameters:

Monday, February 4, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

The True Costs of a Startup Failing

I read an article in Fortune magazine’s online site this week titled “What Happens When a Startup Goes Bust”. The article focused on vendors who don’t get paid when startup fails. It gives examples of several small businesses owed various amounts of money in the wake of Bay area food delivery startup Munchery failing. And while the article is interesting in its take on vendors losing out on payments and how venture capital firms should have more accountability, it doesn’t even give a single mention to those who end up getting screwed the most when a startup fails: the employees of the startup.

Monday, February 4, 2019 | 13 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow For Expiration Dates

We all have a near endless list of expiration and reminder dates to keep track of: software renewals, contracts, driver’s license, certifications, warranties, and on and on. Or maybe we want a better way of seeing when that pesky doctor or vet appointment is without scrolling endlessly through our calendar. Keeping track of all those dates is a constant hassle. If we’re lucky, we get an email or snail-mail a few weeks ahead of time. But how many of us could tell what’s coming up in next 6 weeks or 6 months? In this post and the next, we’re going to create two new Flows to make it easy for us to keep track of those on-rushing dates of import that we need to keep track of.

Monday, January 21, 2019 | 6 minutes Read

Developer Stockholm Syndrome

Developers seem to have an irrational love/hate relationship with programming languages. We tend to love the languages we use on a regular basis. And we seem to hate languages we don’t or no longer use. I’ve come to refer to this as Developer Stockholm Syndrome. As a quick aside before we get into the main content, there is endless debate about what constitutes a programming language. For example, many will say SQL is not a programming language. I say it is. Regardless, this post is about languages and language-adjacent entities and I use the term “programming language” to include them all.

Thursday, January 10, 2019 | 9 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Manually Triggering a Flow

My previous articles on Flow have all had external Triggers of some kind: a blog post, a tweet, a timer and so forth. There are times when you want to have a Flow that you can trigger on demand. One solution to that is to use a Flow button. The Flow mobile app for iOS and Android has a menu tab (currently the middle of the menu options) called “Buttons”. When you create a Flow that is started by a button Trigger, a button will appear in your app allowing you to trigger the Flow.

Thursday, January 3, 2019 | 7 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Adding Some Delay

In a previous post, I walked through saving tweets to an Azure table so they could be retweeted later with an #ICYMI tag. As with most processes of learning, we do the hard way first to learn the concepts. And then we learn the easier ways to do it. As it so happens, Flow provides a much easier way to do this. We’re going to add some delay.

Friday, December 21, 2018 | 3 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow Conference

If you didn’t catch it, the Microsoft Flow team ran an 8 hour online conference with a bunch of different Flow presenters talking about a bunch of different ways to use Flow. It’s a lot of amazing content. You can catch it all on YouTube, broken up into 4 2-hour blocks. There are a couple of presenters where the audio had some issues, but overall it was a lot of fantastic content.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018 | 1 minute Read

Flow and 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