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Creating a Logic App API Connection that uses the Managed Identity using Bicep
Logic Apps in Azure provides a platform for building workflows that integrate with various services and APIs. When creating Logic Apps, you must often connec...
“Exposing Azure App Registrations as Secure APIs: A Guide to Authentication with ‘User Assignments Required’ Turned On”
Azure App Registrations are a powerful tool for managing resource access and integrating applications with Microsoft's cloud services. While these registrati...
Centrally manage your App Configurations
The application landscape in Azure has grown significantly in recent years, with a wide range of tools and services available to help businesses build, deplo...
Shift Left Security with Microsoft Security DevOps (MSDO)
With the new capabilities released add Ignite, you are now even more capable of shifting security checks further to the left. In this article, I explain how ...
Microsoft Defender for DevOps
During Ignite 2022, Microsoft released Microsoft Defender for DevOps. With Microsoft Defender for DevOps, you can discover, monitor, and detect threats in yo...
Default Role Based Access Control on newly created resource groups
Within our company, we have a sponsorship subscription we use for developing / testing purposes. As we heavily use this subscription, we often come into prob...
Building your Azure Policies (GitHub Actions) - Part 3
As written in part 1, policies are used to maintain the state. The Azure portal itself contains a lot of OOTB policies, but you also want to create and deplo...
Building your Azure Policies (Azure DevOps) - Part 2
As written in Part 1, policies are used to maintain the state. The Azure portal itself contains a lot of OOTB policies, but you also want to create and deplo...
Building your Azure Policies - Part 1
Azure Policy is a way of enforcing standards and guardrails and assessing resource compliance. In Azure, the compliance dashboard offers an aggregated view t...
Azure Costs Analysis preview with Anomaly detection
Microsoft has released new functionality in public preview to manage the costs of Azure subscriptions. This new functionality gives excellent insights into t...
Version number counter now supports the build identity
I released a new version of the "Version number counter" extension for Azure DevOps this week. The "Version number counter" extension for Azure Pipelines is ...
Custom security recommendation within Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers the option to include custom security recommendations. For custom security recommendations you can think of corporate sec...
User-friendly compliance messages for Azure Policy
When resource creation fails because of Azure Policies the error is not always that descriptive and you will have to search for the failure. If you look at t...
Export existing Azure resources to Bicep
With the new release of Bicep (v0.4.1124) it is now possible to export existing Azure resources to Bicep code. This means you do not have to export your reso...
Using private repositories for Bicep modules
As of version 0.4.1008 bicep now supports repositories for saving bicep modules. Repositories that are supported at the time of writing this article are:
Execute scripts against Azure from GitHub Actions
Within Azure DevOps service connections are used for the authentication against the Azure platform but in GitHub this works a little bit different. Let me ex...
Run cloud native application anywhere with Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes
At the beginning of this year Microsoft released Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes, this enabled you to attach conformant Kubernetes clusters to Azure f...
Using multiple repositories within Azure DevOps pipelines
In numerous situations I have seen seen people sharing code from a centralized Azure Repos sending the scripts via email. On every new version they would sen...
Azure Template Specs managed via Azure DevOps with bicep
Azure template spec is a resource type within Azure used for storing an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template for later use. By using template specs you have...
Running bicep in GitHub Actions
Bicep is a language that is used to simplify the writing of ARM templates. Bicep is a so called DSL (Domain Specific Language) meaning that it is a specific ...
Running bicep within Azure DevOps Pipelines
During Ignite Microsoft released bicep version 0.3.1. With this version the bicep language is not experimental any more. Some pointer about this version are:
Private Azure DevOps agent pool based the Microsoft Hosted Agents
In Azure DevOps it is possible to create a agent pool that references a Azure virtual machine scale set. This scale set can be based on one of the build in i...
The new and shiny - Azure Template Specs
Azure Template specs is a new resource within Azure that is used for saving Azure Resource Manager Templates (ARM). With these template specifics you can lat...
Markdown generation for ARM and PowerShell
After my session at Azure LowLands with the title "You build It, You run It on the Microsoft Platform" a lot of people were interested in a script that I sh...
Managing the Microsoft Azure cloud is not easy, would a cloud team be useful?
Most organizations start with the Microsoft Azure cloud by experimenting and before they know it, an environment is created that is no longer as transparent ...
Control over a Azure Cloud environment? Create a governance plan!
Control over your cloud environment is great. In order to properly monitor and manage a cloud environment, it is important to draw up a cloud governance plan...
Getting started with Project Bicep for Azure ARM
Bicep is at the time of writing an experimental language that you can be used to simplify the writing of ARM templates. Bicep is a so called DSL (Domain Spec...
Book: Implementing Azure DevOps Solutions
The last year I have worked with Henry Been to write the book: Implementing Azure DevOps Solutions. Henry has written the largest part of the book were I was...
What can DevOps do for you
Many organizations say they use DevOps, they see this as a methodology just like Scrum and Agile. However, DevOps is not a methodology but more a culture. Th...
Managing access control for Logic Apps
In some situations access to the workflows needs to be controlled. This has to be done in some way to make sure only specific people can trigger or see the c...
Connecting to the Resource Graph Client via the Resource Graph SDK
In order to retrieve information from Azure Subscriptions someone at a client wanted to use the Resource Graph API. For this they were building an ASP.Net Co...
Testing ARM Templates in Azure DevOps
Two days Ago I published the post "Testing ARM Templates" that mentioned the ARM-TTK PowerShell Module Microsoft is creating to test ARM templates. After wr...
Testing ARM templates
A few weeks ago I was looking at ways how I could test my ARM templates. During my work I create a lot of these templates and it always a lot of work to chec...
Review of 2019
For a couple of years, I have been doing a lot of community work. The most of it was blogging on the various platforms I had during the last decade. This yea...
On-demand Azure Policy Scan
When moving to a DevOps way of working it is important to have a good set of rules on how to work with software and infrastructure. When looking into Azure ...
The past three months of a technology junkie
The last couple of months I haven’t been blogging as much as I would like because it has been a real roller coaster for me and my family. For some reason we ...
Is it Continuous Deployment or Continuous Delivery
The terms Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery are most of the time mistaken with each other. The abbreviation CD is sometime used for Continuous De...
How I try to keep up with technology
Technology is changing in a very fast pace. If we look at Microsoft technologies like Azure, you see changes every week. Because of this I get a lot of quest...
Meet the specified naming conventions in Azure DevOps Git
Collaborating in a Azure DevOps Git repository with a lot of people could become a chaos regarding branch folders. At the start of a project you can specify ...
Combining SonarQube and Azure DevOps
Code analysis is a best practice in a operating continuous integration pipeline. SonarQube can be used in combination with Azure DevOps. If you do not know S...
Securing applications with the Azure Key Vault and Azure DevOps
When developing applications for Azure security it always one of the items you need to cross of your list. Many security requirements can be solved by embedd...
Trigger a Pipeline from an Azure DevOps Pipeline
In some situations, it can be useful to trigger an Azure DevOps pipeline from a pipeline. Triggering a pipeline can be done via the API and trough PowerShell...
Getting Started with Azure Monitoring via AIMS
Since a couple of weeks I'm part of the AIMS Performance Pro team because of my knowledge on Azure and other related topics. The AIMS performance Pro team (...
The new Azure certification paths from Microsoft
Recently, Microsoft released new certifications and the corresponding learning paths. These certifications are more focused on job profiles. Microsoft also c...
2018 review of MsftPlayground
One of the things I like to do is sharing knowledge with the Community. I started my website in 2008 and last year I noticed that I have been blogging for 10...
Administrating and publishing Power BI resources via Azure DevOps
While Power BI started as a self-service tool, it has become a part of the enterprise reporting tooling. With enterprise reporting strong governance can quic...
Building and Deploying Azure DevOps extensions with Azure Pipelines
Azure DevOps extensions can be build and deployed by using Azure Pipelines. In the Azure DevOps marketplace there is a extension available that will help us ...
Version number counter for Azure DevOps
This week I released a new extension for Azure Pipelines called Version number counter. With this extension you add the ability to auto increment a version n...
Azure DevOps Automation
A couple of weeks ago the rename / rebranding of Visual Studio Team Services to Azure DevOps was announced. The rebranding is a great step forward into posit...
The added value of Azure DevOps for your organization
Two weeks ago Microsoft announced Azure DevOps. Azure DevOps is a name change and rebranding of the product Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). The Azure Dev...
Function parameters while debugging PowerShell in Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is becoming one of the tools that you need to use when developing PowerShell scripts. It allows you to debug your scripts. But how do you ...
AKS (Kubernetes) and no connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it
A client of my had an error while connecting to different resources within their Kubernetes cluster in Azure (AKS). Kubectl error On the kubectl commands kub...
Kubernetes (AKS) attached to Azure Storage (Files)
Kubernetes (AKS) can be used for many situations. For a client we needed to make files available trough a Kubernetes Pod. The files needed to be shared betwe...
Local Kubernetes cluster with Dashboard
When developing containers or applications that need to be hosted on Kubernetes it is handy to have a local Kubernetes cluster. With the use of Docker you ca...
Resource Group deployment via ARM templates
When deploying an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template you have to create a resource group within Azure. To deploy a template via script your script would l...
Azure Managed Service Identity and Local Development
Instead of storing user credentials of an external system in a configuration file, you should store them in the Azure Key Vault. Before MSI (Managed Service ...
Updates to my VSTS extensions
Since a couple of months I have been developing extensions for Visual Studio Team Service (VSTS). I created extensions for task I had to do manual a couple o...
The securitydata Azure resource group
Most of the times companies have rules in place for managing their Azure environment. The main rules that should be in place are “Azure Policies” and naming ...
Point to Site VPN Client won’t install
To connect an Azure App Service to a on-premise database you can make use of different solutions. Two of those solutions are: Hybrid Connection VPN On my b...
Invoke Azure Function in your Visual Studio Team Services CI/CD pipeline
A utility task is available for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to invoke an http triggered Azure function. The ability to invoke a Function from your CI/...
VSTS Extension for Azure Role Based Access Control
Today I published an extension for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) that gives you the ability to add and remove role based access assignments in Azure. VS...
2017 review of MSFTPlayground
One of the things I like to do is sharing knowledge with the Community. I started my blog in 2008 and changed the platform a couple of times from WordPress t...
Publish PowerBI files with Visual Studio Team Services
Today I published an extension for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) that gives you the ability to deploy PowerBI files (pbix) to PowerBI.com. It uses the P...
VSTS build or release agent on a self hosted machine in Azure or on premise
You can think of many situations where you would like to create a self hosted machine for Visual Studio team services (VSTS). Installing and configuring a se...
My first public VSTS Extension
A couple of days ago I started developing extensions for Build and Release pipelines of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). One of these extensions is finish...
Listing Azure Services within a CSV file
In some situations you will look into a current Azure Environment and the setup/governance of it and need to migrate or move resources around. The below scri...
Protect your master Branch in VSTS
You can set up permissions and policies to control who can read and update code in a branch on your Git repo within VSTS. You can set permissions for individ...
Azure Event Grid with Custom Events
As of yesterday (16-8-2017) the public preview of Azure Event Grid is live. Azure Event Grid is a fully managed event routing service. Azure Event Grid great...
Removing the Classis Hybrid Connections from Azure (Azure BizTalk Service)
As you know the classic hybrid connections that are build upon Azure BizTalk Services are deprecated. These connection will have to be replaced by the new hy...
Restricting access to your Azure Web Application
As you may know almost everything that is deployed to Azure is publicly available. As with Azure SQL Database you do not have a firewall available for Azure ...
Configure access to a private network for a Azure App Services
On-Premise connections for Azure App Services can be created by using Hybrid Connections. Hybrid connections do not need any development or re-configuration ...
Extensions and Tips for deploying with Azure Resource Templates
Working with Azure Services in different subscriptions means that the Azure Services need to run in different subscriptions. This often occurs when we talk a...
The Build announcement I got from Build 2017 Day 1
This year is my second year at Build. Most announcement during Build are given on Day 1. This blog post is a summary of announcement that I heard of during m...
Build 2017 announcements that effect your work
A couple of minutes ago the keynote of Build 2017 ended. The keynote contained a lot of announcements that I was not expecting. IoT Edge Microsoft announced ...
Part 3 – Console application to call a API with Azure Active Directory Authentication
This post is the third and last in a series of three posts and will help you with the creation of identity pass-through authentication from a client applicat...
Attending Microsoft Build 2017
I love attending conferences that contain great content and especially when this content is presented by Program Managers or Evangelists from Microsoft. Duri...
Part 2 – Azure API Application to query the Azure SQL Database
This post is the second in a series of three posts and will help you with the creation of identity pass-through authentication from a client application to A...
Part 1 – Azure SQL Database with Azure Active Directory Authentication
This post is the first post in a series of three posts and will help you with the creation of identity pass-through authentication from a client application ...
Global Azure Bootcamp - Pass-through authentication with an Azure API Application
This weekend my employer Motion10 hosted one of the many Global Azure Bootcamp around the world. Where I presented about API Applications and .Net Core. This...
Pass-Through Authentication with Azure Active Directory, Azure SQL, Azure API and a Console Application
In situations you need to login to an application and use that identity to access an API (pass-through identity) and also get data from Azure SQL Server. Wit...
Azure Function CI – 3. Deploying the Azure Function from the Build within VSTS
This post is the third and last one in a series of posts and will help you by deploying a CI build for a Azure Function. Prerequisites This blog post is tota...
Azure Function CI – 2. Create a CI Build for the Azure Function
This post is the second one in a series of three posts and will help you by creating a CI build for a Azure Function. Prerequisites This blog post is totally...
Preview of the Policy Management UX
Azure Resource Manager policies provide the ability to manage risks within a Azure environment. To implement this so called policies can be cr...
Azure Function CI – 1. Creating a Pre-Compiled Azure Function
As mentioned in the overview Azure Function provide event-based serverless computing that make it easy to develop and scale your application, paying only for...
Azure Function CI – Overview
Azure Functions provide event-based serverless computing that make it easy to develop and scale your application. By using Azure Functions CI you can setup c...
Trace listeners (Logging) with Application Insights
For every application that is build a logging framework needs to be present. Tracing and Application are framework that can be used in almost every situation...
Speaking at the Global Azure Bootcamp
On 22 April I will be speaking at the Global Azure Bootcamp of Motion10. This year the Global event will be held for the fifth time. It is a one-day deep div...
Creating your first Precompiled Azure Function
Since a couple of weeks it is possible to create Precompiled Azure Functions. This enables the use of .NET assemblies containing the function implementation...
Adding your Client IP to the Azure SQL server firewall
One of the first things that need to be done when you create a Azure SQL database is adding the Client IP address to the firewall of the Azure SQL server. By...
Practice for working with Deployment Slots within Azure App Services
When you make use of Azure App Services you can deploy to different deployment slots. You can choose to work with three deployment slots (dev, tst, acc) and...
Undo Checkout within TFS or VSTS
This post is written as a reminder for myself and for others who keep forgetting. The thing I keep forgetting is where to find the option to undo a check out...
Azure Management
Azure Management and Governance is hard because Azure services are growing at a fast pace. Try to imagine that you are a Azure Administrator for a large comp...
2016 review of MSFTPlayground
One of the things I like to do is sharing knowledge with the Community. I started my blog in 2008 and changed the platform used a couple of times from WordPr...
Azure Resource Templates and Deployment Slots
In some situations you may want to start using Deployment Slots in combination with your Azure App Service. This means you will have separate deployment slot...
Running a Single Instance of a Azure Logic App
In certain scenarios you want to run a Single Instance off a Azure Logic App every time. Scenarios were you need this is when containers are created within y...
Define Azure Resource Manager Policies
Azure Resource Manager policies provide you with the ability to manage risk within you Azure environment. You can write policies to enforce certain situation...
Recommendations on Azure with Azure Advisor
Since last week “Azure Advisor” made it to public preview. Azure Advisor is a recommendation engine that recommends steps to take to optimally configure your...
Alerts on Failed Azure Logic Apps
When working on and maintaining Logic Apps, you want to be notified if a certain action or complete Logic App (workflows) fails. Setting this up can be done ...
Using Certificates in Azure App Services
In different kind of situations you need to use a certificate for authentication or signing. I needed on because I was setting up a Identity Server the Ident...
Custom Self Signed Certificate Identity Server
For Identity server to be able to sign the login request you can add a Test certificate from the Identity Server it self or you are able to generate a certif...
Escape Single Quotes within Azure Resource Template
In some situations you will get into problems when creating a Azure Resource Template. I was creating a solution for a customer and had to add a Logic App to...
Azure and Development Resources
While browsing the internet and reading blog posts I usually find very useful links or great resources that I could use in many situation. The problem is tha...
Setting the API Definition URL and CORS value with ARM
When working with Azure services, you will combine services together. For one of mine integration cases I had to create a LogicApp where in I needed to use o...
ESP8266 based temperature monitor with Azure IOT
Motion10 hosted a summerschool about Azure IOT. For the summerschool me and my colleagues (Jesse Gorter and Wesley Bakker) created several labs and presentat...
SharePoint Rest API Handler
SharePoint contains a lot of Rest API’s that can be used for many scenario’s. You could use them for example in desktop and windows phone applications. When ...
Starting with Azure Resource Templates
Since that Azure uses the Azure Resource Manager you have the ability to setup your own templates for deploying your applications. This can be handy because ...
Azure App Service and Client Certificate Authentication
Azure App Services can make use of Client Certificate Authentication. The options for this are not available in the portal and need to be configured manually...
Azure Active Directory B2C
Azure Active Directory B2C is a feature released a couple of weeks ago in Azure and is still in preview. Azure Active Directory B2C is a consumer identity an...
Pass trough all SharePoint items from the “Get Items” action in Azure Logic Apps
When constructing a Logic Apps that gets information from a SharePoint list you will use the SharePoint “Get Items” action. This action allows you to get ite...
Loving the Application Map in Application Insights
After being at Build 2016 and hearing about the Application Map functionality in Application Insights, I did not had time to explore this functionality. The ...
Azure Functions and Microsoft Cognitive Services
Microsoft is releasing services in very fast pace. This means you really need to keep up with everything. A few weeks back I read about Azure Functions (expl...
Some facts on Azure Functions
A few weeks ago Azure Functions where released during Build 2016. This really wasn’t announced as a big thing. But if you start looking at what you can do wi...
Connect Logic Apps with Azure Functions
Azure functions is a component released a few weeks ago by Microsoft in Azure to easily perform code/function in Azure. “Azure functions is a solution for ea...
Azure Web Application Fundamentals
This weekend my employer Motion10 hosted one of the many Global Azure Bootcamp around the world. Where I presented about Azure Web Application. This year the...
Securing an API app with an Application Identity - Part 2
In the previous post the API app was configured and altered to support Application Identity security. The next step is to make a client application ready to ...
Attending Microsoft Build 2016
I love attending conferences that contain great content and especially when this content is delivered by Program Managers or Evangelists from Microsoft. I ha...
Installing Azure Stack on a laptop with Windows 10
Since the Azure Stack public preview has been released I had the idea of trying to install it on my corporate laptop. My corporate laptop has the following h...
Securing an API app with an Application Identity–Part 1
Deploying an API within Azure is a very simple tasks. But how about security? The API itself is exposed to the outside world. When for example have a API app...
Unable to Establish connection with Azure Remote Debugging
Within one of my projects we had problems with attaching the debugger to our Azure Instances. During the the process we would get a model stating that the op...
Managing your Azure Hybrid Connection with PowerShell
When you have a Azure Hybrid Connection setup the wrong way, you can delete the connection trough the UI but then the Hybrid Connection Manager still knows t...
Motion10 hosting one of the Global Azure Bootcamp
My employer Motion10 will be hosting one of the many Global Azure Bootcamp around the world. In April 2013 the first Global Windows Azure Bootcamp was held a...
Adding Azure App Service Application Settings with PowerShell
Within Azure there is a option to change several configuration settings. When working with Deployment Slots this means you have to click a lot within the Az...
Azure WebJobs made simple
The last couple of weeks I have been playing around with Office Mix. For those who don’t know Office Mix, Office Mix is a add-in for PowerPoint that is in pr...
Azure Hybrid Connection
Hybrid connection is a component of Azure BizTalk Services. With a Hybrid connection you can easily connect Azure App Services with on-premise services behin...
Deploy your Azure Website with VSTS Build
From VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) your can deploy to a Azure Website directly directly from a build. Setting this up will require a couple of steps. In...
Development Cycles (DevOps) and Office365
Just before the Christmas Holiday’s I wanted to share some insights with the readers of my blog around Development Cycles and Office365. Development Cycles c...
Application Insights configurable instrumentation key
Starting with Application Insights can be done by adding NuGet Packages to your project. In the above screenshot you see two NuGet Packages: Microsoft.Appl...
Application Insights integration in Visual Studio
Application Insights has been around for a while now and after a while I was wondering if there was a integration within Visual Studio. For the readers that ...
HTTPS only for Azure Websites
In some situations you would like your Azure website to only work under HTTPS. By default a Azure website will work under HTTP and HTTPS. Today I was searchi...
Release Management in Visual Studio Team Services
Visual Studio Team Services is the formally know Visual Studio Online. The old name brought a lot of confusion I think the new name will do a lot better. Yes...
Forcing a Device Channel
Device channels are a way of using different master pages for different devices. MSDN describes the functionality as followed: “Browsing the web on a ...
Video on ‘Custom List View by Using the JS Link Property’
About a year ago I wrote a article on how to create a custom list view by using the JS link property. This turned out to be a great article and was very much...
Starting a Workflow with CSOM
There are situations were you would like to start a workflow by using code. In one of my last projects there was that kind of situation, in that project we ...
Creating the Release Template that runs after the Build – Part 3
With the component created in part 2 we can start using it to deploy applications to our SharePoint environment. We start by creating a new template. For thi...
Create a custom component to deploy SharePoint Solutions – Part 2
In the first part of the series we have adjusted a build template in order to copy content from source control to the drop location after the build. This con...
Article Published DIWUG Magazine 14 – Management of Host Named Site Collections
A while ago I wrote an article about the management of host named site collections in SharePoint 2013. The magazine it was written for was released today. If...
Adjust the ReleaseTfvcTemplate.12.xaml build template to work with the BizTalk Deployment Framework
If you want to use the BizTalk Deployment framework in combination with Release Management you need to adjust the default build template that comes with Rele...
Customize the Release Management Build template – Part 1
To setup a build in combination with Release Management you need the Release Management build template. This template looks like the default build template b...
Deploy SharePoint Solutions with Release Management
In one of my previous post (Configuring Web Site Binding with Release Management) I showed how you can make a custom action for Release Management to configu...
Offline Installation SharePoint 2013
In many situation you would like to do a offline installation of SharePoint 2013 or you are required to do a offline installation because you do not have a n...
Configuring Web Site Binding with Release Management
Release Management provides a continuous deployment solution that makes release cycles repeatable, visible, and more efficient by automating deployments thro...
Custom list view by using the “JS Link” property.
Customizing a list view could be done by using XSLT in previous version of SharePoint. In SharePoint 2013 this van be done by using the “JS Link” functionali...
User automatically removed from SharePoint Group
During my current project we received an access request from a user. We did what we normally do, we checked the request and added the user in the appropriate...
Warm Up Form Based Web Application
Normal warm up scripts for SharePoint open a site object or web object and make a request to that specific site. When you use form based authentication and d...
Limitations of a Public Facing Website in Office 365
Update :Microsoft is stopping with public facing websites for new Office 365 clients, existing ones will have another 2 year support. http://www.zdnet.com/ar...
Data Deduplication in Windows Server 2012 R2
After reading a lot of information about Windows Server 2012 R2 I found out that it has a really nice feature if you are into virtualization as much as me. W...
My daughter Fiene Vlinder van der Gaag
The last couple of days I haven't been blogging as much as I would like. I also think in the upcoming month I will not have much time to blog. This is all b...
Unable to start User Profile Synchronization Service
A few days ago I wrote a post about loading modules in PowerShell by default: “Load modules by default when opening PowerShell”. Today we had to setup a new ...
Load modules by default when opening PowerShell
At the moment we are working a lot with PowerShell in combination with SharePoint. Over time we created a lot of usable functions that were not availible wit...
Filtering SharePoint Search Results by Content Source
Working for one my projects we were looking for a solution to only retrieve search results for a specific Content Source. In our scenario we had a External C...
PowerShell Scripts
During my current project we are using a lot of PowerShell scripts to administrate the environment and make development easier for us. In this post that I wi...
SharePoint License Versions versus Versions
As a SharePoint developer you do not often get the question what SharePoint version do we need to install. In many situations we see that the Enterprise lice...
SharePoint 2013 and Biztalk 2013 (On-Premise)
For a couple of days we have been trying to connect our On-Premise SharePoint 2013 environment with our On-Premise BizTalk 2013 environment using the SharePo...
Setting up navigation based on search for Site collections
At the moment we are creating a portal based on host named site collections. The root site collection needs to display the sub site collections you have acce...
Event ID 1008 Event log message of the “Perflib” Source
When I was setting up a new SharePoint environment this week I was getting very annoyed about perflib error messages within the event log: “The Open Procedur...
SharePoint 2013 and Visual Studio 2013
For a few weeks I have been using Visual Studio on my normal development environment. Yesterday I decided to install it on a SharePoint 2013 development envi...
Host-Named Site Collections (Provisioning by Code and in Specific Content Database)
Host-named site collections are the preferred method to deploy sites in SharePoint 2013. Because the Office 365 environment uses host-named site collections...
TFS and SharePoint Builds including Automatic deployments – Part 1
Part 1 of this series will instruct how to configure your build server for building SharePoint projects. In Part 2 we will discuss the automatic deploy optio...
Book Reviews
As a IT consultant you always have to renew your skills and start to learn new technologies. In the last couple of months I have been reading a couple off bo...
SharePoint 2013 Workflow with Visual Studio 2012
Today I have been working on a project that required a workflow in order to keep track of a status. Because we were working with SharePoint 2013 I thought le...
SkyDrive Pro Client Application
When using SharePoint 2013 you are able to Sync your document libraries to your local system when using SkyDrive Pro. SkyDrive Pro was only available on: Off...
Google Maps Display Template – SharePoint 2013 – Part 2
As described in my previous post we will be creating a display template for Google maps. When you did not have the change to read part 1 you can do this by u...
Google Maps Display Template – SharePoint 2013 – Part 1
As the most of you will know by now is that SharePoint 2013 has a new web part called the “Content Search” web part. This web part display’s search result by...
Exception: The Execute method of job definition (ID ad81e6cd-51ef-4baa-aedc-d529219368b5) threw an exception
When investigating the errors in the event log today I stumbled upon a strange error: The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.A...
SharePoint Color Palette Tool (ThemeSlots)
Many off you may have seen it in presentations of Microsoft. The tool was then called ThemeSlots. Today I stumbled on the release and it is now called “Share...
Active Directory Picture Synchronization
When you have stored the pictures of employees in Active Directory you would like to have the option to synchronize these pictures to their SharePoint profil...
Minimize JavaScript and CSS – Web Essentials
When working on a Website or Intranet environment and you are using a lot off JavaScript and CSS files you would like to have the possibility to minimize/bun...
Retrieve the Friendly URL of a Publishing Page
One of my first projects with SharePoint 2013 is building a SharePoint website. For the website we had to build a functionality that display’s the URL of spe...
Behold the new SharePoint Splash screen
Last week the new version of SharePoint 2013 was released on MSDN. As a real SharePoint enthusiasts I directly downloaded the version. Information about this...
SharePoint 2013 Released on MSDN
12 October I wrote a post about the fact that SharePoint 2013 and Office Reached RTM. Today I noticed that it came available on MSDN. So the final version is...
SharePoint 2013 Reaches RTM
The Office engineering team signed off on a new Build. The build they signed off for is RTM. This means SharePoint 2013 will be able to be downloaded in less...
SharePoint 2013 Databases without the GUID
When you configure SharePoint 2013 it will create the SharePoint_AdminContent database with a GUID at the end. To keep my database names clean I searched fo...
Article Published Diwug Magazine 7 – SharePoint 2010 Solution Life Cycle Management
A while ago I wrote an article about Solution Life Cycle Management for SharePoint 2010. The magazine it was written for was released today. If you want to ...
Install SharePoint 2013 Public Beta on Windows Server 2012 RC – Part VI – Configuring SharePoint 2013 on Windows Server 2012 RC
Last week we finished the installation of SharePoint 2013. For us to test the new version off SharePoint we still have to do some configuration. The first t...
Install SharePoint 2013 Public Beta on Windows Server 2012 RC – Part V – Installation of SharePoint 2013 on Windows Server 2012 RC
Now that the prerequisites are done it is time to start the installation of SharePoint 2013. First off we will have to some configuration changes. The first...
Install SharePoint 2013 Public Beta on Windows Server 2012 RC – Part IV – Installation of the Prerequisites on Windows Server 2012 RC
With the new version of SharePoint in Public Beta (links). It is time to start with the installation of the prerequisites. When you do not already have the ...
Holiday & SharePoint 2013 Public Beta
Due to my holiday in Argelès-sur-Mer in the South of France on which I enjoyed a week with no Computer and no Internet. Believe it or not !!!! During that ...
Install SharePoint 2013 Public Beta on Windows Server 2012 RC – Part III – Installation of SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 RC
With the new version of SharePoint almost in Public Beta (I have hopes it will be this month) it is time to show how you can install it on the Release Candi...
Microsoft announces Yammer take over.
Microsoft has confirmed that it will take over Yammer for 1,2 milliard dollar. Nice to know it that Yammer will be part of the Microsoft Office department. ...
Do not start Server Manager automatically at Logon – Windows Server 2012
After the installation of the new Windows Server version (Windows Server 2012 RC) it was annoying for me that the “Server Manager” started every time when I...
Install SharePoint 2013 Public Beta on Windows Server 2012 RC – Part II – Installation of Active Directory and DNS Services on Windows Server 2012 RC
6With the new version of SharePoint almost in Public Beta (I have hopes it will be this month) it is time to show how you can install it on the new Release ...
Install SharePoint 2013 Public Beta on Windows Server 2012 RC – Part I – Installation of Windows Server 2012 RC
With the new version of SharePoint almost in Public Beta (I have hopes it will be this month) it is time to show you how you can install it on the new Relea...
What’s New for SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2012
Now that the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate is released (31 may) it is the question, what kind of new features there are in Visual Studio 2012 when yo...
Review: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development Cookbook
Recently I have been asked to review a new SharePoint 2010 book named “Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development Cookbook” written by Ed Musters. When I receive...
Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Workflow Foundation Applications
18 months ago I decided to become Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Workflow Foundation Applications. ...
Windows PowerShell command builder
Today I found something interesting on the internet which I think can help everyone who is working with SharePoint. Microsoft has built a Silverlight applic...
System.ServiceModel.FaultException: The server was unable to process the request due to an internal error.
For one of our clients we are working with a claims based web application. This web application has a custom membership provider that is registered at the w...
Using the ConditionedActivityGroup in Workflow Foundation 3.5
When you create a SharePoint approval workflow the While activity is often used to check if a Task is approved by placing the “OnTaskChanged” activity withi...
Deleting a Project Service Application within SharePoint 2010
A couple of days ago I deleted my Project Server Web application because I wanted to recreate it. When I tried to create a new Project Web App Site I got th...
Slow file transfer from Windows Explorer view to another Windows Explorer view of SharePoint.
Today I was replacing certain SharePoint documents for one of the projects we are working on. I noticed that the transfer of the document from Windows Explo...
Deleting the extended web application
This post I’m as a reminder because a few days back when I was working on a production environment for one of our clients. I had created an extended web app...
Visual Studio cannot debug managed applications because a kernel debugger is enabled on the system.
I developed some awesome features for my SharePoint environment and to my Surprise they weren’t working that well. So I thought lets attach it to the debugg...
Birth of my Beautiful son Tibbe Abbel van der Gaag
For the last couple of weeks it has been quiet on my blog. It also has did not work for almost a week. This was all because of the birth of my son Tibbe. H...
Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1
Two days ago Microsoft released the first Service Pack for the 2010 Office suite. This means there is also a Service Pack for SharePoint 2010. In the Office...
Creating a SharePoint Designer Action for the Sandbox
One of the new features in SharePoint 2010 was the possibility to create Sandbox solutions. Sandbox solutions are custom build solutions that run in another...
.NET Library for quick and easy Twitter integration
A few days ago I wanted to create a solution to automatically tweet new blog posts. Because I did not have enough time to write a custom component to commun...
CKS - Development Tools Version 2.0
On 17 may a new version of the CKS Developemt tools edition was released. The community kit for SharePoint: Development tools edition is a extension for Vi...
Fully certified SharePoint 2010 Specialist (MCPD & MCITP)
It took me long enough to get all off the SharePoint certificates but Yesterday I finally passed the last exam. I know have the following SharePoint 2010 c...
Encoding SharePoint Field names.
During my last projects I have been asked the same questions. The question was how can you get the normal name of a SharePoint field name that is encoded li...
SSL and Send To Locations
When you are using SharePoint in combination with SSL and Send To locations you have to register you certificate with SharePoint when you would like to regi...
Problems with the SPSiteDataQuery and Content Type Name
Last week a colleague and I were working on a solution to find items by its content type within a site collection using the SPSiteDataQuery. When we m...
Office 15 images have been discovered
Last year Office 14 was released. And now there are images discovered of Office 15. Take a quick look: http://tweakers.net/nieuws/73196/eerste-beelden-van-...
Re-Submitting files with the Content Organizer (Submitting files through code)
About a week ago I wrote an article about the “Content Organizer” feature of SharePoint 2010. The “Content Organizer” feature makes it possible to route al...
Http Redirect with Query string in IIS 7
In the last couple of years I have had several url’s for my blog: The first: http://www.smeikkie.nl The second: http://www.blogaboutsharepoint.com The ...
SharePoint 2010 Content Organizer Feature
Within SharePoint 2010 Microsoft has changed a lot of the content management features. One of those features is content routing which you can do with the Co...
SharePoint Content Query web part like a SharePoint List View
I have been working on a solution to aggregate documents from sub sites to the top level site of SharePoint with the out of the box features. To accomplish ...
Problems with the SharePoint 2010 Rest services ListData.svc
On a current project I'm working on we found a strange behavior problem with the Rest services of SharePoint. When you create a normal list (custom list or ...
CRM 4.0 SDK
In the last couple of projects I have been at we had a lot of integration question and development request to integrate several objects from CRM. Not In all...
New version SPDisposeCheck
The SPDisposeCheck v14.0.4762.1000 was updated and released 12/13/2010. SPDisposeCheck is a tool that helps developers and administrators check custo...
Problems with SharePoint 2007 Migration to SharePoint 2010
At the office one of mine colleagues (Jos van Vlimmeren) was trying to perform a migration of a SharePoint 2007 site to SharePoint 2010. He had a backup of ...
How to check for User Profile changes in SharePoint
In SharePoint each user has a User profile and has the ability to change profile properties. In certain situations you would like to see what the users has ...
Default save location of a document initiated in SharePoint
For the last couple of day's I have been developing word templates. In these templates I had to get the url of the site in which the document was initiated. ...
Exception: [COMException (0x81072101): <nativehr>0x81072101</nativehr><nativestack> </nativestack> Cannot complete this action.
When I was working on a project I had to create a list instance of one of our own list definitions. I created a feature with the following element.xml. <...
Creating Metadata Properties through code - SharePoint 2010
When you work on SharePoint project you often see solutions that are built by using the search engine of SharePoint. To perform queries against the search e...
SharePoint Site Search Settings (Search Scope DropDown)
Today I was working on some SharePoint master pages and I noticed that the search scopes dropdown was gone. After searching around in the site collection ad...
Provisioning My Sites SharePoint 2010
In certain scenarios you would like to provision the My Sites of the users before you go live with the environment. Within SharePoint 2010 you have got seve...
Console Application for SharePoint 2010 [No User Profile Application available to service the request. Contact your farm administrator.]
Today I was working on some cool features to update the User Profile store in SharePoint 2010. To test this feature I usually use a Console Application. In ...
SharePoint 2010 Custom Errors
About a year ago I wrote a article on deactivating the custom errors off SharePoint 2007. That had to be done in the following manner: Step 1: Change <Sa...
Article in TechNet Magazine
For the Dutch TechNet magazine I wrote an article about the security within SharePoint. This is my first TechNet article and I think it has turned out great...
SharePoint Memory Leak
A few day’s ago I stumbled on a article about SharePoint Memory leaks because we were looking at memory leaks for 1 of out clients. I found a great article f...
Installation of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
Update: Since a few weeks I'm using Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V installed. This option works far better then VirtualBox. Besides this I also installe...
SharePoint 2010 Documentation
A few day’s ago (April 15) Microsoft released a great set of documentation about SharePoint 2010. The following documentation can be downloaded: Sha...
SharePoint 2010 reaches RTM
16 April Microsoft reached an exciting engineering milestone: the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 20...
(PDF) SharePoint Icon Integration
A few months ago I have created a solution to automatically add a icon (PDF) to your SharePoint farm. I never had the change to test it on a multiple server...
SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 Launch Date
Today, it is officially announced that May 12th, 2010, is the release date for SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010. The RTM of the products they are tryin...
Failure in loading assembly
In the application event log I found several errors that were pointing to assemblies that I wasn’t using anymore. The error looks like the message below: Er...
Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate is Available
A few day’s ago the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2010 became available. Visual Studio 2010 feels a lot faster and is about 1GB larger then older versi...
Inline Editing in SharePoint 2010 (UI and Code)
Within SharePoint 2010 it is possible to enable inline editing on list items. This can be done by changing properties on a view of a SharePoint library what...
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Gets New Launch Date
In late 2009 Microsoft added an extra test release to the schedule of Visual Studio 2010. This resulted in a push-back of the launch date of the product. Mi...
Hiding the ‘Create Site’ option in the Site Actions menu
Within SharePoint you have something called custom actions. You can use custom actions to create custom menu items within SharePoint. Besides custom actions...
SharePoint 2010: Getting Started with Development
When I was reading and searching information about SharePoint 2010 on the internet I found I really helpful page in the Microsoft download to get star...
Deploying multiple wsp packages with one installation file
Today the public beta of SharePoint 2010 is released and everyone started blogging about SharePoint 2010. I am still preparing a Virtual Machine because the...
SharePoint 2010: Getting Started with Development – Part 2
More and more resources are coming available for starting development with SharePoint 2010. Today I received a link from MSDN Flash with some cool new devel...
So long “Blog About SharePoint” and Hello "Microsoft Playground"
Almost two years ago I started "Blog About SharePoint" to blog about SharePoint related subjects. The last couple of months my focus has changed to more Mic...
Sitemap Provider for Community Server 2.1
For my new blog I had to create a sitemap provider to provide my content to several search engines. Because I did not find any solution on the internet I th...
ASP.NET Checkbox with confirmation message
For one of my assignments I had to create a checkbox that displays a confirmation message when you uncheck a checkbox. I thought I would share my solution w...
Prompting for Credentials
Often people ask me a question why Windows keeps prompting to login when you open a document from SharePoint. To automatically login you can change the setti...
Using Windows Server as a Desktop Operating System
On this planet there are a lot of geeks (Including me) that run Windows Server 2008 (R2) as their desktop operating system. I installed my development lapto...
Hiding the "New Site" option in the Site Actions menu - SharePoint 2010
A long time ago I wrote an article about hiding the create site action within the site actions menu for SharePoint 2007. Within SharePoint 2010 you hide the...
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2
A few days ago I started setting up an internal development environment for SharePoint. This environment needed to exist of a Domain server, Database server...
Login to Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 with another account / from another domain
A few days ago I and my colleague Wesley had a lot of problems installing of Team Foundation Server on Windows Server 2008 with a Separate SQL Server 2008 a...
Team Foundation Server Installation Error: 28938
For the last couple of days my colleague and I have been installing Team Foundation Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008 with a separate SQL 2008 and SharePoi...
Fully certified SharePoint Specialist
It took me long enough to get all off the WSS and MOSS certificates but today I finally passed the last exam (Configuring Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 : ...
Configure Kerberos authentication
A few weeks ago I tried to set up a SharePoint farm that uses Kerberos authentication. I always thought it was just a setting in SharePoint but infect it is...
Feature for adding a Icon to your SharePoint farm
On the internet you can find several articles about how to add an icon to the SharePoint farm.. Microsoft also has a KB article that describes how you can ac...
Adding profile properties through code
It can occur that you want to add a property to the property collection of the user profile store by using a feature. If you want to use a feature you would...
SharePoint 2010 Preview
Today I was reading a post of one of my old colleges. In this post he mentioned a link to a site that gives you a preview to SharePoint 2010. On this site t...
Information Management Policy Configuration
In 2008 I wrote a post about testing your custom expiration policy (here). In this post I explained that the expiration policy is only runs once day what is...
Starting a workflow through code
Within SharePoint there can be situation in which you would like to start a workflow through code, like in an event receiver. But how do you start a workflo...
Branding a SharePoint site – Part 2
Last week I wrote the first article in a series of articles about branding your SharePoint site. In the first article we discussed how to brand your site an...
Branding a SharePoint site – Part 1
Within SharePoint and WSS you have the possibility to brand your site. You can do this on several ways: A custom style sheet. A custom theme. I think th...
SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 2
Yesterday Service Pack 2 was released for SharePoint. In my post “Office Service Pack will be available on 28 April” you can read about some changes that ar...
Handle access denied for application pages
Within SharePoint you have the ability to create custom application pages. Application pages remain in the layouts folder of SharePoint. Each user can acces...
Search Results on a Internet Facing SharePoint Site
When you crawled a SharePoint site everything on that site will become visible on the search results page of your search center. If you have an internet faci...
Access SharePoint Data from the Database
When you are developing web parts or other kind of solutions for SharePoint it is possible you work yourself in a situation where you use the SharePoint API...
Office Service Pack will be available on 28 April
The Microsoft Update Product Team Blog announced today that Office Service Pack 2 will be released on 28 April this year. The formal changes you can aspect ...
Access denied while crawling sites
Today I received the strangest error when I was configuring my SharePoint Virtual PC to crawl my websites. The crawler inserted a error for each web applica...
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart versus Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart
When I started developing for SharePoint two years ago I was thrown in a big black hole and started to develop webparts by hands on experience. In the first...
Problems with Re-installing Windows SharePoint Services
Problems can occur when you are trying to re-install Windows SharePoint Services. The problem occurred when I was trying to install the Dutch version off WS...
Sitemap Protocol
When you are developing an internet facing SharePoint site you want search engines too completely and correctly crawl your site. A sitemap protocol (xml sit...
TimerJob status stays Initialized 0%
Last week I was developing a custom TimerJob for SharePoint. For the development of the TimerJob I used the MSDN documentation that is written by Andrew Con...
Bulk deletion of SPListItems (SPListItemCollection)
A few days ago I had to develop a TimerJob that deletes a large number of items from a SharePoint list. My first idea was to iterate trough the list items a...
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
For some time now I have been following information about SharePoint 14 that finds its way to blogs or news sites. In that time I have found a large amount ...
February Cumulative Update Uber Package
In my post a week ago I announced that the February Cumulative update was available for download but it could only be used by users who had the December Cum...
ASP.Net Server Controls
In January of this year I wrote a post about creating a virtual earth web part (You can read about it here). I had done this by adding JavaScript to the pag...
Removing the Contextual Search items from the Search Drop Down Box
For one of our clients we were looking for a solution to remove or replace the search result page that is used by the contextual searches from the Search Dr...
February Cumulative Update
The new cumulative update for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services is available for you to apply to you server farm. The ...
Problem with importing User profiles (0x800706D9)
For one of our clients we have got an internet facing SharePoint site. For this website SharePoint user profiles need to be available. When we configured th...
ASP:Menu in IE8
Since a few days I have installed Internet Explorer 8 on my computer and I was curious how it would display certain sites. Till a few hours ago everything l...
Using SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges()
The last time I have been receiving questions about using SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges in a SharePoint webpart. This made me think and I thought by ...
Scheduling SharePoint Backup : Part 2
A while ago I posted a SharePoint Backup script so that it is possible to schedule a SharePoint Backup. I had to make some adjustments to the script because ...
Content Editor WebPart ControlAdapter
One of our clients had a internet facing website. With this website we had a number of problems because it was deployed to our Internet facing farm with Con...
Disposing of SharePoint Objects (SPDisposeCheck tool Finally Available!)
Update: A new version of the tool is available as you can read here On the internet you can find several excellent articles on the various design patterns f...
Virtual Earth WebPart
After reading a post on the blog of Wesley Bakker I thought by myself maybe it is fun to create a webpart in which we can load a map from Virtual Earth. And...
Integration Reporting Services with SharePoint 2007 in Native Mode
It is possible to integrate SQL Reporting Services with SharePoint 2007, but know the question is how you integrate it with SharePoint. The easiest why is t...
SharePoint prompts to login multiple time when opening a document
One of our most annoying issues we came across in one of our projects was the problem that SharePoint kept prompting us to login when we were opening a docum...
Scheduling SharePoint Backup
Update:Version 2.0 available of the script here For one of our clients we had to schedule the SharePoint Backup what isn’t possible trough the interface, so...
Disabling the MySite link for all your users
Did you ever have a problem with your my site? Well we did! The customer wanted a Citrix webpart on their my site. I did not recommend it but still they wan...
Changing the user that runs the Application Pool
For a project we were working on we created a web application with a wrong application pool Identity. We wanted to set this correctly and we thought we coul...
Free e-book offer SQL Server 2008 from Microsoft
Today I received a Microsoft Newsletter to inform me that there is a new free eBook offer for SQL Server 2008. I tough that more people can take advantage f...
Setting up SharePoint search
This is a walkthrough for the configuration of SharePoint Search. Central Administration Navigate to Central Administration Shared Service Provider Select y...
Testing Expiration Policy
When you add an Expiration Policy to a library in SharePoint you can only test your policy once a day. This is because SharePoint only runs the TimerJob for...
This Page has been modified since you opened it. You must open the page again.
In one of our development environments we came across a very annoying error in SharePoint, when we were using a custom site definition: “This Page has been ...
Windows SharePoint Services on Vista
It has been there for a while WSS on Vista but I never tried it out. Last night I had some spare time so I thought let’s give it a try on my home desktop ma...
How to add and read properties from the feature.xml
I knew it is was possible to provide features with properties but I never found a useful situation till a few days ago. So know is the question how do you ...
Placing webparts in the webpart gallery when you create a site.
Normally when you develop webparts you have to place the webparts in the webpart gallery before you can add them to your page. When you develop webparts for...
Inserting initial information in a site definition
For a current project I had to figure out how to place information in a list in SharePoint when you are creating a new site from a site template and place d...
Enabling and Using site information in an ItemAdding event of a document library
In SharePoint 2007 you are able to write custom event handlers for a document library. Some of the different events you can rewrite are: ItemAdding: Before ...
Useful things for your SharePoint VPC
On several sites there are postings about tools you could have on you SharePoint development VPC. That’s why I thought lets post what I have got on my devel...
Disabling SharePoint errors (An unexpected error has occurred)
One of the most annoying things I came across when I was developing for SharePoint 2007 is the error: “An unexpected error has occurred”. You can get rid of...
Silverlight in SharePoint
At the SharePoint Conference 2008, Bill Gates announced that it is possible to display applications that are developed in Silverlight in SharePoint 2007. Em...
Useful tool for multiple language deployment
For a current project I had to deploy some generated lists (stp templates) on another version of SharePoint (Dutch version). Because I’m a beginning program...