Blogs

Azure DevOps Expired Service Principal

September 15, 2021

Fix your failed Azure DevOps Release Pipeline if you get this error:

Error: Could not fetch access token for Azure. Verify if the Service Principal used is valid and not expired.

Locally Debugging an Event Grid event in an Azure Function

December 6, 2020

I have a requirement to add a JSON file to Azure Blob Storage and have an Azure Function automatically process it via a BlobTrigger. Simple enough, but when reading the docs for BlobTrigger, I came across this section on Polling (emphasis mine): In addition, storage logs are created on a “best effort” basis. There’s no guarantee that all events are captured. Under some conditions, logs may be missed. If you require faster or more reliable blob processing, consider creating a queue message when you create the blob.

Migrated to Hugo

August 30, 2020

I have successfully migrated my blog from Jekyll to Hugo. The ability to generate the entire site from a single executable is very appealing. What pushed me to finally make the move was a security notification from GitHub: apparently one of the ruby gems Jekyll relies on had a vulnerability. I’m not a ruby developer, and I blog so infrequently that it’s a pain to try to remember how to update my local ruby environment and keep everything working, so… Hugo it is!

How to use .NET Standard 2.0 NuGet packages with F# Interactive

June 26, 2018

I have been learning F# recently, and one of the great things about it is the REPL, called F# Interactive.

I ran into a problem when I tried to reference the Newtonsoft.Json NuGet package in an .fsx file, like so:

Project file is incomplete. Expected imports are missing.

June 12, 2018

After many months of doing other things, one of our devs tried to open our solution in the latest version of Visual Studio 2017 (15.7.3), only to be greeted with the following error message:

Project file is incomplete. Expected imports are missing.

Huh?

Azure Web App deployment fails to build class library project that uses C# 6 features

August 18, 2015

Update 2015-10-12: The Azure team resolved this issue last month, and you no longer need to perform the steps that follow.

Upgrading RDLC schema from 2008 to 2010 in Visual Studio 2013

June 20, 2015

Disclaimer: This worked for me, but as with all undocumented hacks, proceed at your own risk.

There may be a better way to do this, but I couldn’t find it. I trust that your .rdlc files are in source control, and that you can rollback to a previously working version if this causes problems.

For various reasons, I needed to upgrade my RDLC report’s schema version from the default 2008 version to the 2010 version.

Azure WebJob with status "Never Finished"

March 18, 2015

I was a little confused as to why one of my Azure WebJobs had a status of “Never Finished”:

Ensuring a SQL Server column copies as text to an Excel column

February 1, 2015

The problem arises when you have a column with character strings that look like numbers. Looking like a number isn’t a problem in and of itself, unless the value starts with the character “0”. Excel will try to treat the column’s values as a number, and therefore eliminate any leading 0s.

Authentication fails with access_denied error while using Microsoft.Owin.Security.Google 3.0.0

August 30, 2014

Just a quick tip:

If you’re trying to use Google Oauth 2.0 to authenticate users in your MVC 5 application, start with this tutorial: