As of March 31st, the Dark Sky API is no more, replaced by Apple’s WeatherKit. I’ve used the Dark Sky API as it had a generous free-tier, was easy to...
I had an interesting one come across my desk here at WTF HQ earlier this week - before I knew it, I was up to my neck in decompiled data...
Want to go straight to the code? Here it is Teams Presence Presence info has been around a long time - we had it in Skype for Business and its...
Interested in hosting SwaggerUI/OpenAPI docs for your B2C-protected APIs? NSwag Swagger/OpenAPI is a way of defining your APIs through a common markup - from that markup, you and your customers/API...
This came across my desk this morning and it happens frequently enough that I figured it worth writing about (write once, refer frequently!). Cloud services are made for automation from...
Obviously we want systems that use modern authentication. In the case of Azure AD, you get the good stuff, like Conditional Access and a whole host of new authentication mechanisms,...
Recently, Shannon & I got an interesting request from a customer who is using multi-tenant App Services (e.g., non-ASE), but wanted to keep communications restricted to their virtual network. If...
Photo by Slava Bowman Recently, I had an interesting question come across my desk from a customer: How do we ensure Service Bus message ordering and get active/active geographic availability?...
I’ve been on paternity for a bit now so taking time to tackle some home projects. Today’s was a Z-Wave Garage Door remote for SmartThings. The kids are constantly leaving...
Original source, CC-BY 2.0 I saw an article today about apps that send location data to third parties. This isn’t especially new, but it got me thinking. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/a-dozen-popular-iphone-apps-caught-quietly-sending-user-locations-to-monetization-firms/ I’ll preface this...
I’ll preface this to say I know literally nothing about Android (or mobile, in general) development. I’ve used Xamarin for about 7 hours now and I think it’s neat, but...
We get some strange and interesting requests over here at WTF HQ and today’s is no different. From a colleague: One of my clients has web apps in one sub,...
Over here at WTF HQ, I’ve now had a couple data scientist friends ask about getting this wired up — so let’s dig in. If you’re moving BigQuery data with Azure Data...
If we want to access protected resources from our apps, we usually have to ship a key and secret in our app. This traditionally meant registering an application/service principal in...
I have been quiet on here recently. There are two major reasons why, which I’ll get to here momentarily — but the tl;dr is that the majority of any new production is...
It can be done. A little painful, but doable. Recently decided to upgrade from my Netgear SRX5308 here at home to a shiny new Unifi Security Gateway (v3). Quieter, much less...
The Partner of Record program allows Microsoft partners to get a cut of customers’ spend in various online services. Office 365 and Azure are two of the big services offering...
Windows 10 IoT — the promise of a universal app that can run, quite literally, anywhere. This includes tiny, cheap computers like the Raspberry Pi and Minnowboard MAX. Raspberry Pi 2 It’s quite...
Updated 7/30/15 Here’s the latest that’s working with IE 11 on Windows 10 RTM/10240: Set-AdfsProperties -WIASupportedUserAgents @(“MSIE 6.0”, “MSIE 7.0; Windows NT”, “MSIE 8.0”, “MSIE 9.0”, “MSIE 10.0; Windows NT...
I’m looking into build agents for VSO for a client this week. If you haven’t noticed in your VSO tenant, the build.vNext system is now available in most of them....
Fred. More cloud patterns in real life — this one, while a little silly, illustrates availability, geographic redundancy, rolling upgrades and consistency. Enjoy. Meet Fred. This is Fred. Fred is my son’s...
What a wild few weeks — Build saw the official announcement of Service Fabric and some other hot Azure news and Ignite saw Azure for Enterprise/Azure Stack and loads of other announcements....
I’m working with a client right now on modernizing and simplifying their search to use the new Azure Search service. Sure, the examples online are fine, but I wanted to...
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in Tampa recently — most recently Cardinal’s first annual Innovation Summit for our Tampa service. I like flying to Tampa because the airport has...
Today was a neat day in the Azure space — Azure Websites has grown up and found itself. We’ve got new units of functionality that can build fully functional apps and workflows,...
Here’s one we get frequently — no one wants their enterprise Azure account administered by someone’s Xbox Gamertag. ‘noobslayer@hotmail.com’ doesn’t look great during a review of admins, nor is it easy to...
I’ve been speaking about Azure AD + cloud identity a lot recently, mostly at DevCamps along the east coast (which, by the way, if you’re near one you should come...
Azure Resource Groups. Simultaneously the most exciting and most frustrating part of Azure vNext. While powerful, today they’re quite inflexible — no API is exposed to allow editing info (like names), moving...
Mobile services. MVC Web APIs. They’re all over and ubiquitous now. In some cases though, WCF is still the platform of choice for service developers. Sometimes it’s interoperability with other...
Every day we’re bombarded with vendors, providers and ahem consultants telling us we need to break up our apps for maximum scalability & availability for the cloud. This is true — one...
For anyone who’s used the ASP.net MVC templates with multi-organizational authentication, you’ll inevitably end up with a bunch of generated entity framework goo for keeping track of organizational certificate thumbprints...
That headline may come across as rather spoiled, a la Louis CK’s always entertaining rant against people complaining about wifi on airplanes (you’re in a chair. In the air). The...
If you’ve spent any time with the Azure Graph API, it’s pretty sweet. Federated identity for the masses, with almost zero drama. Up until now I was mostly doing logins,...
I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday in Charlotte on September 20th. My session is on building a ‘shim’ for passive logon to Microsoft Online Services (Office 365, Azure, any federated...
This is a point that’s a bit ambiguous. I’m an Azure Service administrator, so I should be able to access the Azure AD associated with that tenant, right? In a...
Document signing + SharePoint Online with non-licensed users flew across my desk at WTFHQ today. Here’s the basic requirement: Licensed users need to store PDFs in SharePoint while getting them...
If you’re here wondering why the Library Post SharePoint app isn’t working, I’ve got some news for you. Unfortunately, it’s not good news, as I’m currently unable to access, manage...
Recently, Azure VMs got endpoint ACLs — this is a great addition and one of the biggest things I missed from AWS’ security groups. Using them on VMs is great and all,...
Start here if you haven’t already. We’ll start with the last example — I’m piloting Yammer, I’ve got some users I want to grant access, but a whole lot more I want...
I’m going to have to make this a two-parter, because some company *ahem* Yammer — doesn’t appear to handle the Deny (http://schemas.microsoft.com/authorization/claims/deny) claim very well. By very well, I mean at all....
My wife’s work laptop is a joke. Although she has no administrative rights, it recently got infected with one of those ransomware-type viruses. I tried to help her out — what I...
Since I can’t seem to find anything online regarding external users + IRM secured lists, I decided I should put it up here. In short, External users using Microsoft Accounts...
Keep ’em lowercase. They’re DNS names, so while the should be case-insensitive, they are, in fact not. So if you’re getting 400s creating queues (since Bad Request is so helpful,...
Needless to say, you’ve made it. I decided to move both johndandison.com/blog & wtfsharepoint.com here and to consolidate the content. There’s still some stuff lagging behind, but I think for...
An interesting problem came across my desk at WTFHQ this week. Then it asked me to drop trau and cough. Shared Workstations. Shared workstations. Used by those in the most...