Development

Turning Any JSON API Into An App

The Internet is fantastic. There are a seemingly infinite array of APIs available for people to use. Many of them are completely free and open to use in pretty much any way you want to. For example, NASA has a wide variety of things available through its public API. I use one of them in Power Automate with a custom connector to post their daily image to Twitter. For my contribution to this year’s C# Advent, I will demonstrate how easily you can implement any JSON-based API into a C# based application.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 | 9 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2022

I’m participating in the Advent of Code again this year. We’ll see if I get further than I did last year, which was about halfway before I quit. You can follow my progress in my GitHub repo over here. As usual, my solutions are written in C#.

Wednesday, December 7, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Festive Tech Calendar 2022

By the way, I contributed to this year’s Festive Tech Calendar with a video on how to use low-code automation solutions like Power Automate and IFTTT to automate your holiday season. Check out the video here: There’s a lot of great submissions. Go check them out!

Tuesday, December 6, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Using DALL-E and Power Automate To Create and Share Images

One big current trend, for good or ill, is AI-generated images. There are a number of services out there to generate these images and most of them have an API that you can hit against and which have various price points for that access. For our example today, we’ll use DALL-E 2, from OpenAI. Their introductory level gives you 50 free credits the first month and 15 free credits each month after that. One of the cool features of DALL-E 2 is that in addition to the ability to create new images from text suggestions, you can also upload an existing image and make edits to that based on your suggestions.

Friday, December 2, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

An Overview of SQL Data Types

I have been asked to do more posts on databases, so I’m returning to the world of relational databases this week. I posted an introduction to databases a few months back that you can take a look at for a 10,000-foot view. The next logical step seems to be to take a look at the types of data available across the SQL standard and the more common relational database systems out there.

Tuesday, November 22, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

Function Friday - Chunk, Sort & Reverse

Power Automate has added a number of new expression functions and features recently. This time around I’ll take a look at three of those new functions: chunk, sort and reverse. Chunk The chunk function lets you break up strings or arrays into blocks of equal length. The format is as follows: chunk(<string>, <length>) chunk(<array>, <length>) The first parameter is the string or array you want to break apart. The second parameter is the length you want for each chunk. The result that is returned is an array of chunks. If the array or string doesn’t break apart evenly based on the requested length, the remainder will be in the last array element.

Friday, November 11, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

Video: AI Builder - Creating a Custom Image Recognition Model

This time I take you on a tour of using AI Builder in Power Automate to create a custom image recognition model to identify gaming dice.

Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Video: An Intro to AI Builder on Power Automate

A new video this week. Bringing a quick introduction to the AI Builder feature on Power Automate.

Tuesday, November 1, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Function Friday - Xpath

Power Automate doesn’t give you any built-in methods for editing XML content, and that’s fine. XML is a devil-spawned file format that should die thousands of deaths and never see the light of day again. But, if you’re forced to use XML and need the ability to search and parse that XML in your flows, then Power Automate provides you a means for doing that search: XPath. The format is simple:

Friday, October 28, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

Error Handling with Power Automate

One of the things in Power Automate that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention is the available features for error handling. So today we’re going to delve into the kinds of features and design patterns you can use to help your flows run smoothly, even when things go wrong. After Action Failure Branching The most basic feature available is after-action failure branching. Normally a flow passes from trigger to action to action and so forth in a more or less straight line. There are actions such as the condition action that let you take different branches based on some condition. But one of the features of Power Automate lets you use that same concept to take a different pathway based on whether the previous action succeeded (the default) or failed.

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 | 5 minutes Read

Function Friday - Coalesce

I had intended to cover the XML XPath function this week. But due to some time constraints I needed to make this a quick hit this week, so I’m going over the coalesce function instead. The coalesce function is quite simple. You pass in any number of arguments and coalesce returns the first item in that list that isn’t a null value. coalesce(<item1>, <item2>, <item3>, ...) The function looks at each item in the order that they are passed in and whatever the first one that isn’t null is will be your output value. You can pass in variables or static values.

Friday, October 21, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Function Friday - JSON Manipulation

Apologies for the delay. It’s been a rough few weeks lately. A lot of the work we do as developers is to pass data back and forth. Typically these days that data is passed in JSON format (though the usage of XML is still fairly widespread). Sometimes we need to make changes to that data as it passes through. Thankfully, Power Automate provides a few functions to help you work with JSON data.

Friday, October 14, 2022 | 3 minutes Read