Posts by Year

2024

Exploring the Bicep test framework

6 minute read

As Infrastructure as Code (IaC) becomes increasingly integral to modern cloud deployments, ensuring the reliability and correctness of infrastructure code is...

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2023

Getting started with deployment stacks

6 minute read

Since June this year, a new functionality in public preview called deployment stacks. Deployment stacks are Azure resources that enable you to manage a group...

Verified commits in GitHub

5 minute read

Git commits can be signed by using a GPG key. With this GPG key, you can prove that a specific commit comes from you. Doing this will also add a ‘Verified’ b...

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2022

Centrally manage your App Configurations

10 minute read

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...

Microsoft Defender for DevOps

3 minute read

During Ignite 2022, Microsoft released Microsoft Defender for DevOps. With Microsoft Defender for DevOps, you can discover, monitor, and detect threats in yo...

Building your Azure Policies - Part 1

11 minute read

Azure Policy is a way of enforcing standards and guardrails and assessing resource compliance. In Azure, the compliance dashboard offers an aggregated view t...

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2021

Export existing Azure resources to Bicep

1 minute read

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...

Running bicep in GitHub Actions

3 minute read

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 ...

The new and shiny - Azure Template Specs

5 minute read

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

10 minute read

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...

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2020

Book: Implementing Azure DevOps Solutions

1 minute read

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

4 minute read

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

3 minute read

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...

Testing ARM Templates in Azure DevOps

1 minute read

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

2 minute read

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...

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2019

Review of 2019

3 minute read

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

2 minute read

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 ...

How I try to keep up with technology

2 minute read

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...

Combining SonarQube and Azure DevOps

4 minute read

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...

2018 review of MsftPlayground

1 minute read

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...

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2018

Version number counter for Azure DevOps

2 minute read

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

3 minute read

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...

Local Kubernetes cluster with Dashboard

2 minute read

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

3 minute read

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...

Updates to my VSTS extensions

1 minute read

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

2 minute read

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

1 minute read

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...

2017 review of MSFTPlayground

1 minute read

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...

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2017

My first public VSTS Extension

1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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

1 minute read

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

6 minute read

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...

Attending Microsoft Build 2017

2 minute read

I love attending conferences that contain great content and especially when this content is presented by Program Managers or Evangelists from Microsoft. Duri...

Preview of the Policy Management UX

2 minute read

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 – Overview

1 minute read

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...

Speaking at the Global Azure Bootcamp

2 minute read

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...

Undo Checkout within TFS or VSTS

1 minute read

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

6 minute read

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...

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2016

2016 review of MSFTPlayground

1 minute read

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...

Define Azure Resource Manager Policies

3 minute read

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

4 minute read

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

2 minute read

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

3 minute read

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...

Azure and Development Resources

2 minute read

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...

SharePoint Rest API Handler

6 minute read

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

14 minute read

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 Active Directory B2C

5 minute read

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...

Some facts on Azure Functions

4 minute read

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

1 minute read

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

2 minute read

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...

Attending Microsoft Build 2016

1 minute read

I love attending conferences that contain great content and especially when this content is delivered by Program Managers or Evangelists from Microsoft. I ha...

Azure WebJobs made simple

1 minute read

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

5 minute read

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

4 minute read

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...

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2015

Development Cycles (DevOps) and Office365

3 minute read

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...

HTTPS only for Azure Websites

1 minute read

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...

Forcing a Device Channel

2 minute read

Device channels are a way of using different master pages for different devices. MSDN describes the functionality as followed:   “Browsing the web on a ...

Starting a Workflow with CSOM

6 minute read

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 ...

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2014

Offline Installation SharePoint 2013

2 minute read

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...

Warm Up Form Based Web Application

3 minute read

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...

My daughter Fiene Vlinder van der Gaag

less than 1 minute read

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...

PowerShell Scripts

11 minute read

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...

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2013

SharePoint License Versions versus Versions

less than 1 minute read

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 Visual Studio 2013

2 minute read

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...

Book Reviews

less than 1 minute read

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...

SkyDrive Pro Client Application

less than 1 minute read

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...

SharePoint Color Palette Tool (ThemeSlots)

less than 1 minute read

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

1 minute read

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...

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2012

Behold the new SharePoint Splash screen

less than 1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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

1 minute read

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

2 minute read

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...

Holiday & SharePoint 2013 Public Beta

less than 1 minute read

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 ...

Microsoft announces Yammer take over.

1 minute read

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. ...

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2011

Windows PowerShell command builder

1 minute read

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...

Deleting the extended web application

less than 1 minute read

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...

CKS - Development Tools Version 2.0

1 minute read

​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...

Encoding SharePoint Field names.

less than 1 minute read

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

1 minute read

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...

Office 15 images have been discovered

less than 1 minute read

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-...

Http Redirect with Query string in IIS 7

1 minute read

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

3 minute read

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...

CRM 4.0 SDK

1 minute read

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...

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2010

New version SPDisposeCheck

less than 1 minute read

The SPDisposeCheck v14.0.4762.1000 was updated and released 12/13/2010.  SPDisposeCheck is a tool that helps developers and administrators check custo...

Provisioning My Sites SharePoint 2010

1 minute read

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...

SharePoint 2010 Custom Errors

1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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...

SharePoint 2010 Documentation

less than 1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

Today, it is officially announced that May 12th, 2010, is the release date for SharePoint 2010 &amp; Office 2010. The RTM of the products they are tryin...

Failure in loading assembly

less than 1 minute read

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...

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2009

Sitemap Provider for Community Server 2.1

less than 1 minute read

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

2 minute read

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

1 minute read

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...

Fully certified SharePoint Specialist

less than 1 minute read

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

10 minute read

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...

Adding profile properties through code

1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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...

Starting a workflow through code

3 minute read

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

5 minute read

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

9 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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

1 minute read

Within SharePoint you have the ability to create custom application pages. Application pages remain in the layouts folder of SharePoint. Each user can acces...

Access SharePoint Data from the Database

4 minute read

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...

Access denied while crawling sites

3 minute read

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...

Sitemap Protocol

1 minute read

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%

1 minute read

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...

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

3 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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

1 minute read

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...

February Cumulative Update

1 minute read

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 ...

ASP:Menu in IE8

1 minute read

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...

Scheduling SharePoint Backup : Part 2

5 minute read

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

4 minute read

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...

Virtual Earth WebPart

4 minute read

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...

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2008

Scheduling SharePoint Backup

5 minute read

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...

Setting up SharePoint search

3 minute read

This is a walkthrough for the configuration of SharePoint Search. Central Administration Navigate to Central Administration Shared Service Provider Select y...

Testing Expiration Policy

less than 1 minute read

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...

Windows SharePoint Services on Vista

1 minute read

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...

Useful things for your SharePoint VPC

1 minute read

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...

Silverlight in SharePoint

less than 1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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...

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