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Function Friday - The String IndexOf's

For this week’s #FunctionFriday, I’m going to cover 3 more string functions. This group is related to searching for a particular block of text within a string: indexOf, lastIndexOf, and nthIndexOf. All three of these functions work pretty much the same way. You pass in the text you are searching for and the text you are searching within, and it tells you whether or not if found a match. Let’s start with the base function: indexOf.

  • flow
  • function-friday
  • power-automate
Friday, March 18, 2022 | 3 minutes Read
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Contributing to the Community

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken the opportunity to participate in a number of “coffee chats” with some who are just getting started in the developer community. They come from all over the place: Ohio, North Carolina, Nigeria, Panama, South Africa, India. But they all share a common desire to join the developer community. I’m grateful to be a tiny part of their learning process and I wanted to share just a little bit about my experiences so far.

  • charity
  • community
  • giving
Tuesday, March 15, 2022 | 7 minutes Read
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Function Friday - Add, Sub, Mul, Div

One of the weakest areas for Power Automate’s functions is in the math and numbers area. For this week’s #FunctionFriday, I will delve into the first batch of math-related functions, I’m going to cover the basic 4: add (addition), sub (subtraction), mul (multiplication), and div (division). The pattern is basically the same for all of them: add(5.5, 6) //returns 11.5 sub(5.5, .5) //returns 5.0 mul(3, 3) //returns 9 div(9, 3) //returns 3 You have the function name and then two number parameters. And therein lies the most frustrating part of the functions. You can only pass two parameters. If you need to do math with more than two numbers, you have to call the function multiple times. Like so:

  • flow
  • function-friday
  • power-automate
Friday, March 11, 2022 | 3 minutes Read
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Function Friday - Concat & Substring

For the first of my #FunctionFriday posts I’m going to focus on a couple of the most common string functions: concat and substring. concat The first function we’ll look at is concat. This function lets you glue together 2 or more other strings into a single string. The syntax is simple: concat(string 1, string 2, string 3) There isn’t a limit on the number of strings you can combine together, but you have to supply at least 2 arguments. These arguments can be any combination of literal strings, string variables, and string outputs from previous actions in the flow.

  • flow
  • function-friday
  • power-automate
Friday, March 4, 2022 | 3 minutes Read
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Power Automate Connectors: Azure DevOps

One of the many useful connectors available in Power Automate is the connection to Azure DevOps. There is a wide variety of things you can do, including creating and updating tickets, responding to changes in ticket status, or responding to build events or code check-ins. In this post I’ll walk through a couple of examples related to interacting with Azure DevOps. Scenario 1: Creating a work item One of the more useful examples is the ability to quickly create a work item in response to some trigger. In this particular case, we’ll use a Microsoft Form to provide our clients a means of reporting bugs that we’ll use to trigger the creation of a bug in DevOps.

  • connectors
  • devops
  • flow
  • power-automate
Tuesday, March 1, 2022 | 3 minutes Read
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Power Automate - Expression Functions

While it’s fantastic to be able to use Power Automate to connect to hundreds of different systems to move data from place to place, one of the most powerful features of Power Automate are the functions you can use in expressions to manipulate data. Over the coming weeks, each friday I’ll take a deeper dive into various functions and how they work. But for this first post, I’ll provide a high level overview of expression functions and their use in Power Automate.

  • expressions
  • flow
  • function-friday
  • functions
  • power-automate
Friday, February 25, 2022 | 6 minutes Read
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Auto-delete Gmail Promotion Emails

Cleaning up junk mail is an ongoing tribulation. Gmail does a pretty good job of identifying emails that are promotional in nature and flagging them as such. But over time those promo emails can eat up your email space and leave you with a mess to clean up. Thankfully, Power Automate can help us keep those promotions emails in check. Creating Our Trigger Unfortunately, the Gmail connector for Power Automate doesn’t let you list emails in your mailbox. The only thing you can do is react when a new email arrives. So while it won’t help you clean up your existing mess, we can set up a flow to deal with the new emails going forward. For this flow, we’re going to select the Gmail “When a new email arrives” trigger.

  • flow
  • gmail
  • power-automate
Saturday, February 5, 2022 | 3 minutes Read
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Podcast: Codementor - Tech Interviews: Best Practices from an Engineering Manager with Barret Blake

I did a session on tech interviews and how to approach them. At the time I was a manager who was conducting quite a few interviews. I think most of my thoughts still apply.

  • codementor
  • interviewing
Wednesday, February 2, 2022 | 1 minute Read
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Podcast: Codementor - Tech Interviews: Best Practices from an Engineering Manager with Barret Blake

Me talking with Taylor Desseyn about careers in tech, interviewing and so forth. Listen to my episode

  • GC 2.0
  • interviewing
Wednesday, February 2, 2022 | 1 minute Read
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Did You Know? Automating a Daily Factoid

(NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) Final post for the year. Returning once more to Power Automate. This time we’re automating the posting of a random factoid from a spreadsheet to social media. This is similar to the other post I made that posts a random blog post from the archives. Creating Our Trigger We’ll start by creating a scheduled flow. How often you post will depend on how many items you have to select from. You want to avoid posting the same thing frequently, at least in my opinion anyway. For this one, I am posting a quick note about the various connectors available in Power Automate. Currently, there are more than 500 connectors available, so I’m going to post every other day. That’s enough content to go out over two years of regular social media posting. Longer, really, since we’re doing a random selection and there’s likely to be repetition along the way.

  • content
  • flow
  • power-automate
Wednesday, December 29, 2021 | 5 minutes Read
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C# Advent 2021 - Using C# Code in Power Automate

This post is my contribution to the C# Advent 2021. Power Automate has a fantastic feature in preview that lets you add some C# code to your flows. It requires using a custom connector, so it’s limited to those with a license that allows that. There are also a number of other limitations which I’ll get into later. But it’s a start.

  • C#
  • c-advent
  • custom-connector
  • dotnet
  • flow
  • power-automate
Monday, December 13, 2021 | 6 minutes Read
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Advent of Code - Day 12

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 12 - Passage Pathing. Problem 1 The Puzzles for Day 12 are a pathing problem. We are finding our way through a cave system. The system has a start point, and end point and a series of caves that are either large caves (represented by capital letters) or small caves (represented by lower case letters). The cave system input is in a the format of:

  • advent-of-code-2021
  • C#
  • dotnet
Sunday, December 12, 2021 | 6 minutes Read
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