Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function

23rd of April, 2018 / / No Comments

The requirement that I will be addressing in this blog is how to Promote and Demote site pages to news articles in Modern SharePoint sites. This approach allows us to promote any site page to News, add approval steps and demote news articles to site pages if the news need to be updated. The news also shows in the modern news web part when the site page is promoted.
Solution Approach:
To start with, create a site page.… [Keep reading] “Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function”

How to quickly copy an Azure Web App between Azure Tenants using 'Zip Push Deploy'

16th of April, 2018 / / No Comments

In the last couple of weeks I’ve had to copy a bunch of Azure WebApps and Functions from one Azure Tenant to another. I hadn’t had to do this for a while and went looking for the quickest and easiest way to accomplish it. As with anything cloud based, things move fast. Some of the methods I found were too onerous and more complex than they needed to be. There is of course the Backup option as well.… [Keep reading] “How to quickly copy an Azure Web App between Azure Tenants using 'Zip Push Deploy'”

Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure

13th of April, 2018 / / 5 Comments

Managed service identities (MSIs) are a great feature of Azure that are being gradually enabled on a number of different resource types. But when I’m talking to developers, operations engineers, and other Azure customers, I often find that there is some confusion and uncertainty about what they do. In this post I will explain what MSIs are and are not, where they make sense to use, and give some general advice on how to work with them.… [Keep reading] “Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure”

Deploy active/active FortiGate NGFW in Azure

10th of April, 2018 / / 22 Comments

I recently was tasked with deploying two Fortinet FortiGate firewalls in Azure in a highly available active/active model. I quickly discovered that there is currently only two deployment types available in the Azure marketplace, a single VM deployment and a high availability deployment (which is an active/passive model and wasn’t what I was after).
FG NGFW Marketplace Options
I did some digging around on the Fortinet support sites and discovered that to you can achieve an active/active model in Azure using dual load balancers (a public and internal Azure load balancer) as indicated in this Fortinet document: https://www.fortinet.com/content/dam/fortinet/assets/deployment-guides/dg-fortigate-high-availability-azure.pdf… [Keep reading] “Deploy active/active FortiGate NGFW in Azure”

Building a Teenager Notification Service using Azure IoT an Azure Function, Microsoft Flow, Mongoose OS and a Micro Controller

28th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

This is the third and final post on my recent experiments integrating small micro controllers (ESP8266) running Mongoose OS integrated with Azure IoT Services.
In the first post in this series I detailed creating the Azure IoT Hub and registering a NodeMCU (ESP8266 based) micro controller with it. The post detailing that can be found here. Automating the creation of Azure IoT Hubs and the registration of IoT Devices with PowerShell and VS Code
In the second post I detailed communicating with the micro controller (IoT device) using MQTT and PowerShell.… [Keep reading] “Building a Teenager Notification Service using Azure IoT an Azure Function, Microsoft Flow, Mongoose OS and a Micro Controller”

Creating SharePoint Modern Team sites using Site Scripts, Flow and Azure Function

16th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

With Site Scripts and Site design, it is possible to invoke custom PnP Provisioning for Modern Team Sites from a Site Script. In the previous blog, we saw how we can provision Simple modern sites using Site Scripts JSON. However, there are some scenarios where we would need a custom provisioning template or process such as listed below:

  • Auto deploy custom web components such as SPFx extension apps
  • Complex Site Templates which couldn’t be configured
  • Complex Document libs, content types that are provided by JSON schema.
… [Keep reading] “Creating SharePoint Modern Team sites using Site Scripts, Flow and Azure Function”

Create Modern Pages and update metadata using SPFx Extensions, SP PnP JS and Azure Functions

13th of March, 2018 / / 3 Comments

Modern Site Pages (Site Page content type) have a constraint to associate custom metadata with it. In other words, the “Site Page” content type cannot have other site columns added to it as can be seen below.
SitePageContentTypeMissing
On another note, even though we can create a child content types from Site Page content type, the New Site page creation (screenshot below) process doesn’t associate the new content type when the Page is created. So, the fields from the child content type couldn’t be associated.… [Keep reading] “Create Modern Pages and update metadata using SPFx Extensions, SP PnP JS and Azure Functions”

Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 6: Build and Deployment

20th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

So far in this series we’ve been compiling our server-side TypeScript code to JavaScript locally on our own machines, and then copying and pasting it into the Azure Portal. However, an important part of building a modern application – especially a cloud-based one – is having a reliable automated build and deployment process. There are a number of reasons why this is important, ranging from ensuring that a developer isn’t building code on their own machine – and therefore may be subject to environmental variations or differences that cause different outputs – through to running a suite of tests on every build and release.… [Keep reading] “Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 6: Build and Deployment”

Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 5: Unit Testing

13th of February, 2018 / / 4 Comments

Over the last four parts of this series, we’ve discussed how we can write server-side code for Cosmos DB, and the types of situations where it makes sense to do so. If you’re building a small sample application, you now have enough knowledge to go and build out UDFs, stored procedures, and triggers. But if you’re writing production-grade applications, there are two other major topics that need discussion: how to unit test your server-side code, and how to build and deploy it to Cosmos DB in an automated and predictable manner.… [Keep reading] “Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 5: Unit Testing”