Development

Using Application Insights For Better Application Logging

As you gain more experience as a developer, you soon realize the importance of good logging for your applications. When an app is small, you can get away with console logging, print statements, etc. But once your app reaches any real size or functionality, especially as you reach your MVP state, it’s time to have some real logging. For that, we can turn to Application Insights. Application Insights is an Azure cloud-hosted logging platform that you can use to keep track of the performance and errors in your live web apps. As the Microsoft docs put it, you can use App Insights to “automatically detect performance anomalies, diagnose issues, see what users actually do with your apps, and help improve app performance and usability”.

Tuesday, August 2, 2022 | 8 minutes Read

Function Friday: Binary, DataUri, UriComponent, and Base64 Conversion Functions

This time I’m going to delve into conversion functions for base64 and binary. Both are typically used to convert binary files such as images and zip files back and forth between formats that various connectors need in order to process them. It’s also sometimes used to generate hashes used for checksums, certificates, and encryption. base64 The base64 function is used to convert a string into a base64 encoded version of a string. The pattern is:

Friday, July 29, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Power Automate: Connectors from Independent Publishers

One of the most fantastic parts of Microsoft Power Automate is its ability to connect to a massive array of other systems to push and pull data. Early on this was restricted to those systems that Microsoft had created connections to or had worked with external vendors to develop connections to their systems. In recent years, however, they added the ability for people to create their own connectors to external systems and to share those connectors with the community at large. There are now a huge number of Microsoft-approved community-created connectors available for Power Automate. In this post, I want to highlight a few of my favorites.

Tuesday, July 26, 2022 | 5 minutes Read

A Brief Introduction to Azure Data Factory

Over the last year or so I’ve had a chance to delve deeply into one of Microsoft’s newer Azure offerings: Azure Data Factory (ADF). This post is a summarized version of a talk I’ve given at a few conferences and meetups in recent months. A huge part of what we deal with in tech is data. It’s everywhere, and it’s only getting bigger. It used to be that if we needed to move data between different systems or data sources, we would have to spend hours, days, or even weeks writing some custom integration that would take the data from one system and convert it to be imported into a different system.

Wednesday, July 13, 2022 | 8 minutes Read

Function Friday - Data Type Conversion Functions - Bool, Decimal, Float, Int, String

For this batch of functions, we’ll start delving into the data type conversion functions. For the first group let’s look at the base type conversions. They all work pretty much the same way. Bool The bool function is used to convert input data into boolean form (i.e. true or false). The format is pretty straightforward: bool(<value>) The value can be of number or string data types. The output depends on the data type of the input. Numbers all work the same way, whether it’s an int, float, or decimal. If the input number is 0, bool returns false. If the input number is any other value, positive or negative, and the result is true.

Friday, July 8, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - Collection Functions: Contains, Item, Join

For the last group of collection functions, we’re taking a look at the functions that focus on the items in the collection itself. Contains The contains function details whether or not a collection contains a specific element. The result is a boolean value (true/false). The pattern is as follows: contains('collection', 'value') contains([collection], 'value') The exact way it works depends on what the collection is. If the collection is a string, the contains function works to find a substring of characters.

Friday, June 17, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

Function Friday - Collection Functions: Intersection, Union, Skip, Take

For the second batch of collection functions we’re taking a look at the functions that let you work with the collections themselves. These functions let you slice, dice, and merge one or more collections together. Intersection The intersection function compares two or more collections and returns a new array that contains only the elements that exist in all the passed in collections. The format is as follows: intersection(collection1, collection2, ...) As with all the functions, you can pass in collection variables or literals, and strings are treated as character arrays.

Friday, June 10, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - Collection Functions - First, Last, Empty, Length

Power Automate contains excellent support for working with collections of objects. Generally, these will be treated as arrays of objects. However, these functions will also work with strings as, in Power Automate, strings are also considered a collection, as they are essentially an array of characters. As such, Power Automate contains a good selection of functions for working with these collections. For my return to functions in Power Automate, we’ll take a look at the first group of collection functions: First, last, empty, and length.

Friday, June 3, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

$hero image$

Function Friday - More Math

I previously covered some of the base math functions available. This time I’ll cover the math functions that are related to working with arrays of numbers. This includes the max, min, rand, and range functions. max & min These two functions work the exact same way. The max function returns the largest number in an array of numbers, and the min function returns the smallest number in an array of numbers. The format is as follows:

Friday, April 8, 2022 | 2 minutes Read

Easily Create New Bulk Work Items From a Spreadsheet

There are a lot of ways to keep track of work items: Azure DevOps, Trello, Jira, and so on. One thing they all have in common is that it can be tedious to create a bunch of work items at once. It can be a lot easier to just create a huge list of work items in a spreadsheet, especially at the beginning of a project when you’re brainstorming all the various requirements and features to be included.

Tuesday, April 5, 2022 | 6 minutes Read

Function Friday - Slice and Split

This week I’m returning to some of the string manipulation functions: slice and split. slice The slice function is essentially an enhanced version of the substring function. The pattern for the function is as follows: slice(string, startIndex, endIndex) The first parameter is the string to be examined. As always this can be a string literal, a variable, or the output from a previous trigger or action. The second is the startIndex. Unlike the substring function, if the startIndex value is greater than the length of the string, an empty string is returned instead of an error. You can also pass in a negative value for your startIndex. Doing so will count backward from the end of the string and start looking there. For example:

Friday, April 1, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Copy Events From One Calendar To Another

I recently began offering mentoring sessions for developers who were just getting started in their careers. Calendly offers a great way to allow people to sign up for sessions that fit into my calendar. And while it’s great that it will check two calendars for my availability, it won’t add the event to multiple calendars. But that doesn’t fit into my needs. I wanted the events to be created on my personal Outlook calendar for various reasons, but I also wanted the events added to my work Outlook calendar so I don’t get double-booked with both work and personal events. Power Automate to the rescue once more!

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 4 minutes Read