Development

Creating a Custom Connector - Part I

Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels (NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) For those with the higher tier licenses, along with being able to use the premium connectors, you also have the ability to create your own custom connectors that you can use to connect to just about any API on the web. For our fun project this time, we’re going to take the next two blog posts to create a custom connector that makes use of the NASA public APIs in order to grab the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) and then we will create a flow that runs daily to post that day’s picture in a tweet to our Twitter feed.

Thursday, November 18, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

AI Builder: Training an Object Recognition Model

Last time we looked at identifying information on an invoice. Another feature AI Builder in Power Automate offers is the ability to recognize objects in an image. This time we’re going to look at how to set up AI Builder to identify dice. It should be noted that AI Builder is a paid add-on to Power Automate and does incur an extra cost to use. However, a free trial is available. See the Microsoft Power Automate site for more info. Getting Started Invoice processing required that you gather at least 6 samples of each invoice that you wanted to train the model for. Object identification requires quite a bit more. For training, you will need a minimum of 15 images for each object that you want to identify, plus additional images for testing. Ideally, however you will want at least 50 images of each object.

Monday, November 15, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

AI Builder: Training a Invoice Processing Model

One of the more complex features of Power Automate is the ability to train it to pull data out of scanned images of invoices and automatically import the information. I included a walkthrough of how to get started with this feature in my recent conference talk at Summit NA 2021, but I felt it would be beneficial to provide it in blog form as well. It should be noted that AI Builder is a paid add-on to Power Automate and does incur an extra cost to use. However, a free trial is available. See the Microsoft Power Automate site for more info. Getting Started The first thing you are going to need to get started is to gather at least 6 images of each format of invoice you intend to automate. You will need at least 5 images of each type to use to train the AI model to recognize where to find the data being sought from the invoice. The rest of the sample images will be used to test the model once it’s trained. If you’re looking for example invoices to use for learning purposes, the Microsoft AI Builder documentation includes 2 versions of invoices you can use for this purpose. Or you can use real invoices that you have around.

Sunday, November 7, 2021 | 9 minutes Read

Power Automate Desktop

Photo by Mateusz Dach from Pexels This time round I’m going to delve into Power Automate Desktop (PAD). PAD is a service that allows you to perform activities on a local machine as part of a flow. It’s a service that used to require an extra subscription cost, but it’s now available to everyone included with whatever tier of Power Automate you currently have. What Can You Do With PAD? So the big question is what can you do with Power Automate Desktop? And the answer is, quite a bit. Among the things you can do:

Sunday, May 23, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

Using Power Automate to Start, Stop and Restart Azure App Service

Photo by Linda Eller-Shein from Pexels There are any number of reasons why you might want to start or stop your Azure App Service based on other factors. And while there are a number of ways to accomplish this, this time we’re going to cover how to do it in Power Automate with the press of a single button. Whether you want to start, stop or restart you app service, the flow works exactly the same way. As always, we start with a trigger. This time we’re going to use a button trigger so that we can restart our app service at the press of a single button. In Power Automate, create a new instant cloud flow. Give your flow a name and then select “Manually trigger a flow”.

Sunday, May 16, 2021 | 2 minutes Read

More Securely Access an HTTP Request Trigger

Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels In a previous post, we learned how to trigger a Power Automate flow by calling an HTTP endpoint. The best part of this trigger is that it allows you to trigger your flow from anywhere on the internet, be it an application or right in your browser. The trouble is, there isn’t security for that endpoint “out of the box”. Anyone who knows the endpoint’s URI can call it. So how do you secure that endpoint so that only someone who is authorized to call the endpoint can get it to run?

Thursday, May 6, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

Using an HTTP Request Trigger

Request by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images This time around we’re going to talk about the HTTP request trigger. This is one of the automated category of triggers that allows you to trigger a flow to run from an HTTP request. This flow is really handy if you have some data you can put into a JSON schema that you want to process in some way. One example from the templates list is passing in data to the flow to use to create a user in Azure Active Directory.

Friday, April 30, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

C# Advent 2020 - ASP.NET Core API Endpoints

MVC is a mess. Controllers in one folder, views in another, services in another, models and viewmodels in yet other folders. Related files are all over the place. Trying to piece together these related pieces can be a real pain. Steve “ardalis” Smith has come up with another way: ASP.NET Core API Endpoints. The concept is a simple one. Everything that’s related can easily be put in one folder, maybe even in one file. Steve explains much better: “Instead of Model-View-Controller (MVC) the pattern becomes Request-EndPoint-Response (REPR). The REPR (reaper) pattern is much simpler and groups everything that has to do with a particular API endpiont together.” By putting everything together, maintenance and development are all much easier. As Steve notes, this is a concept that the .NET team has done in creating Razor pages.

Saturday, December 19, 2020 | 6 minutes Read

Gulp Build Not Working In Visual Studio But Works On Command Line

I’ve been working quite a bit with a project recently that uses gulp to build the CSS and JavaScript files in Visual Studio from the Task Runner Explorer. Recently, this build suddenly stopped working and I couldn’t figure out why. It ran just fine from the command prompt, but in Task Runner Explorer, it threw all kinds of errors. This is an older project and requires an older version of NodeJs and gulp to be installed.

Thursday, August 20, 2020 | 2 minutes Read

Azure Hybrid Connections To Local IIS Server Not Connecting

I found myself needing to create an Azure Hybrid connection from a web application hosted on Azure to a WebAPI application hosting on a server inside a company network. I kept running into one issue that was preventing me from successfully creating my connection. If you find, like me, that no matter what you try, your Hybrid connection just keeps telling you “Not Connected”, there’s one thing you should check in your installed Windows Features list.

Saturday, January 25, 2020 | 1 minute Read

The Nightmare Before Blazor

Boys and girls of every age Wouldn’t you like to see something strange? Come with me and you will see This, C# in WebAssembly This is Blazor, this is Blazor C# in my browser, what a sight This is Blazor, C# devs in WebAssembly C# in my browser, what a sight This post is part of the 2019 C# Advent. Check out all the amazing posts here.

Friday, December 13, 2019 | 11 minutes Read

Tagging Images with Flow and Azure Vision API - Part I

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash This time, in our continuing adventures with Microsoft Flow and the Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision API, we’re using the Vision API to tag image files. The flow will pass the Vision API image files from OneDrive and update the image files with the list of auto-generated meta tags the service returns to us.

Monday, August 5, 2019 | 4 minutes Read