Preventing double-app-loading behaviour with ADAL.js

26th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Microsoft’s JavaScript implementation of its Azure Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL.js) allows for some great client-side-only Single Page App (SPA) scenarios.
Unfortunately (as with most things auth-related), there are some gotcha’s to be aware of. One relates to how ADAL obtains refresh tokens in this crazy world of implicit auth.

Implicit Auth Flow

Implicit auth allows for the application developer to not have to host their own token authentication service. The ADAL.js and the Azure AD auth endpoint do all the heavy lifting:

It’s the bottom third of the diagram (after the token expires) that causes the issue I am addressing in this post.… [Keep reading] “Preventing double-app-loading behaviour with ADAL.js”

Seamless Multi-identity Browsing for Cloud Consultants

29th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

If you’re a technical consultant working with cloud services like Office 365 or Azure on behalf of various clients, you have to deal with many different logins and passwords for the same URLs. This is painful, as your default browser instance doesn’t handle multiple accounts and you generally have to resort to InPrivate (IE) or Incognito (Chrome) modes which mean a lot of copying and pasting of usernames and passwords to do your job. If this is how you operate today: stop.… [Keep reading] “Seamless Multi-identity Browsing for Cloud Consultants”

Azure Functions Cold Start Workaround

4th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Intro

I love Azure Functions. So much power for so little effort or cost. The only downside is that the consumption model that keeps the cost so dirt-cheap means that unless you are using your Function constantly (in which case, you might be better off with the non-consumption options anyway), you will often be hit with a long delay as your Function wakes up from hibernation.

So very cold…

This isn’t a big deal if you are dealing with a fire and forget queue trigger scenario, but if you have web app that is calling the HTTP trigger and you need to wait for the Function to do it’s job before responding with a 200 OK… that’s a long wait (well over 15 seconds in my experience with a PowerShell function that loads a bunch of modules).… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions Cold Start Workaround”

Community AppStack (Part 1) – Decentralised Realtime Chat Demo With IPFS PubSub and Cycle.js

5th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

I’ve been trying to come up with a good general-purpose tech stack for building web apps for small, local community user-bases. There are lots of great “share-economy-style” collaborative use cases at this level of organisation and I want a vehicle to test out ideas, to see what works and what doesn’t in my local area, from a social standpoint.
I obviously want to make what I develop freely available in hopes that others might contribute ideas or code and I want people to be able to trust that it does what it says on the tin to be able to use it, so everything needs to go up on github.… [Keep reading] “Community AppStack (Part 1) – Decentralised Realtime Chat Demo With IPFS PubSub and Cycle.js”

Quickly deploying all the things from Excel with PowerShell

7th of July, 2017 / / 3 Comments

As an ex-Excel Developer, I tend to resolve any perceived inefficiencies when dealing with any tabular data by automating the snot out of it with Excel and VBA. As a SharePoint developer, there is no shortage of stuff that we need to provision into SharePoint to build business solutions, often repeatedly throughout the development cycle or between environments (Dev, Test, UAT, etc).
PowerShell was always going to be the automation tool of choice, and while PowerShell scripts are commonly fed with CSV files of flat tabular data, editing those has always been painful if you’ve got more than a handful of rows.… [Keep reading] “Quickly deploying all the things from Excel with PowerShell”

Angular Bag of Tricks for SharePoint

21st of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

I’ve been using Angular 1.x for building custom UI components and SPAs for SharePoint for years now. There’s a lot of rinse and repeat here, and over time my “stack” of open-source custom Directives and Services that make Angular such a powerful framework, have settled down to a few key ones that I wanted to highlight – hence this post.
Some may be wondering why am I still working almost exclusively with Angular 1.x? Why not Angular 2, or React, or Aurelia?… [Keep reading] “Angular Bag of Tricks for SharePoint”

Monitor SharePoint Changelog in Azure Function

10th of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Azure Functions have officially reached ‘hammer’ status

I’ve been enjoying the ease with which we can now respond to events in SharePoint and perform automation tasks, thanks to the magic of Azure Functions. So many nails, so little time!
The seminal blog post that started so many of us on that road, was of course John Liu’s Build your PnP Site Provisioning with PowerShell in Azure Functions and run it from Flow and that pattern is fantastic for many event-driven scenarios.… [Keep reading] “Monitor SharePoint Changelog in Azure Function”