Posts

Function Friday - Formatting and Parsing Dates and Times

This week I’m looking at formatting and parsing date and time values in Power Automate. This can be a great pain when working with data in your functions for a straightforward reason: DateTime values come in many different formats. And different systems will require different formats for your DateTime values. And that’s before you even consider the pain of timezones. formatDateTime We’ll first look at formatting. The formatDateTime function takes a DateTime string and converts it into a different format. The pattern is as follows:

Friday, August 19, 2022 | 4 minutes Read

Is a College Degree Necessary To Find A Tech Job?

It used to be that having a college degree was a necessary thing to getting a job in software development. This was especially true at the “entry” level of the spectrum. Oftentimes it didn’t really matter much what that degree was in. It was just “required” that you have one. But is that still the case in 2022? Thankfully, in most cases, the answer is: No. Don’t get me wrong. Some companies still keep a stranglehold on doing things the way they’ve always done them. These companies are collectively known as dinosaurs. They live in the past and they are usually either very big, with a huge bureaucracy (i.e. HR department), or they are owned or run by someone who can’t let go of the past (i.e. an old dude who likes to start stories with “in my day…”). These are the same companies that are currently demanding that developers and engineers return to working onsite in the office, because “reasons”. And in today’s world, these are companies that are struggling to get and keep talent.

Tuesday, August 16, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

Function Friday: Date and Time Addition

This time I’m going to start delving into the date and time functions of Power Automate. Date and time is one of the most painful parts of working with flows. The reason for that is that sometimes a DateTime value is a DateTime, sometimes it’s a number, and sometimes it’s a string. Usually it’s a string… mostly. And it’s hard to know which it is at any given moment. Then add to that plethora of different formats that a DateTime value might take to and from all the various external systems and you have another layer of complexity. And for yet one more level of complexity, we’ll add in the issue of timezones.

Friday, August 12, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Video - A Brief Introduction to Microsoft Power Automate

This week I’m presenting my first YouTube video: A Brief Introduction to Microsoft Power Automate. Give it a view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MNnKel_9V8&ab_channel=BarretCodes

Tuesday, August 9, 2022 | 1 minute Read

An Introduction to Microsoft Power Automate

power automate

Friday, August 5, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Function Friday: Data Type Conversion Functions - Arrays, JSON and XML

This time we’re wrapping up the last of the data type conversion functions. We’ll cover the more complex data types: arrays, JSON, and XML. array The array function creates an array from a single input data element. The format is simple: array('<value>') And as an example: array('hello there') // returns ["hello there"] To be honest, there’s no reason to use the array function. The createArray function allows you to pass in multiple data elements and you get the same result.

Friday, August 5, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

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

Guest Post: What are the different types of interviews?

I’ve got a guest post this week provided by the Codementor team. Thanks to them for providing this, and I encourage you to take a look at what they have to offer. Your resume got you in the door. What awaits you is a big hurdle: the interview process. Whether it’s a one-on-one interview with the manager, a group interview with the entire team, or multiple interviews of all types, you’ll have to pass them to land the job.

Tuesday, July 19, 2022 | 9 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