App

Yesterday, on June 20th, the Insider Dev Tour (see insiderdevtour.com) took place in our home town Vienna. It’s a roadshow for software developers in the Microsoft universe delivering the latest news about Windows, Azure, Office, Graph, AI technology and more. I enjoyed being part of the event along with my fellow MVP colleagues and the Windows Development community. The content was more or less pre-defined and included demos and code-focused overviews of the new developer technologies coming out of Redmond. The topics included building native Win32/XAML apps and Progressive Web Apps, how to connect with new ecosystems using the Microsoft Graph and Windows Timeline (my session), how to add AI (Artificial Intelligence) into your projects, and how to bring your experiences into the next dimension through Mixed Reality and more. ...

Microsoft provides a bunch of cloud services, tools, and resources that provide tools for developing an intelligent Bot service. To get started, check out the free “Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications” eBook and download it here! Azure Bot Service provides tools to build, test, deploy, and manage intelligent bots all in one place. The free eBook by Anand Raman and Wee Hyong Tok can be downloaded from Download the Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications after providing your name and email address in the short form on the web page. Afterwards, you can download the Developer’s AI Guide. The book was published by O’Reilly and is available in PDF format. ...

Are you using tools as Telerik Fiddler or Postman for testing HTTP Requests? Well, if you are already working with Visual Studio Code, try out the cool REST Client extension! My colleague Christoph showed me this cool extension for executing HTTP requests directly from VS Code quickly. Simply install the REST Client extension: Press F1, type ext install then search for rest-client as shown in the following screenshot. (Check out the useful Run Code from Visual Studio Code extension as well…) ...

Visual Studio Code (currently, Version 1.22 is available) is a very cool developer tool providing a modern and fast code editor with a bunch of extensions. With extensions as Code-Runner, it’s easy to run a code file or active text directly from the VS Code text editor. Check out this quick description how to configure and use Code Runner. If you are new to VS Code, at a glance: To install the latest version of VS Code, get the download for Windows, Linux or macOS. To run a command, launch the Command Palette with F1 or Ctrl + Shift + P, run Quick Open by pressing Ctrl + P, etc. See all keyboard shortcuts at Windows, macOS and Linux. ...

Want to cleanup unused apps in your Azure Active Directory? Well, that’s easy – but how to accomplish that if the Delete option is inactive? See the quick solution here. So, if you find a scenario as here, where you have an app in your AAD and you cannot delete it… …the reason is that the app is Multi-tenant. As an Admin, you need to modify the app level from Multi tenant to Single tenant, see also here. Open the app properties, scroll down and find the Multi tenant switch and change that to “No”. Then, save the new app properties. ...

When an automated task or an app needs to access data from Office 365, you need to create an app in the tenant’s Azure Active Directory (AAD). For having full control, e.g. for deleting objects in AAD, a so called Service Principal Name (SPN) can be used. That is similar to a Global Admin in Office 365, but just for apps and usually with a predefined expiration date. Which is good. Or? ...

PowerApps are very powerful and simple to use.Through the integration in SharePoint Online lists, we now can create our custom forms within a SharePoint site and add additional features as calculations, modifications and even visualizations. See here, how to integrate a map for showing a location instantly directly in SharePoint without any coding! In this sample, I created a custom list and added a column Location as a single text field. In the PowerApps menu, we see the (new) Customize forms option. As the name says, this allows to modify the display and edit form of that particular list with the PowerApps Online Studio. ...

Serverless Computing is popular. With Microsoft Azure, IT people can concentrate on their tasks and apps without taking care of managing any server infrastructure. One of the key Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) components from Microsoft is the new, extensive Azure Functions service. Learn how to use Azure Functions with the cost-free Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook! The “Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook” book was written by Praveen Kumar Sreeram and reviewed by our colleague Florian Klaffenbach, published by Packt Publishing Ltd. last fall. You can download the free ebook in the Azure Resource Center at Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook. ...

Developers who are not familiar with the new tooling for creating SPFx apps now get support by the new Visual Studio Extension for SharePoint Framework, available in the Visual Studio marketplace. Check it out at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SharePointPnP.SPFxProjectTemplate The description describes the functionality as “The Visual Studio Extension for SharePoint Framework wraps the command-line UI of the Microsoft Yeoman Generator (yo @microsoft/sharepoint) into a familiar Windows Forms experience, executes the generator project scaffolding behind the scenes and creates a Visual Studio project that includes all the necessary files for a complete web part project. Also included is a web part item template for adding new web parts to an existing Framework project. Developers can launch the Workbench local sandbox environment to test their web parts by pressing F5 or by binding to the Gulp Serve event in the Task Runner Explorer.” ...

Working with Visual Studio Code? Then check out the Azure Functions extension for Visual Studio Code at the Visual Studio Marketplace! Find the extension and description at Azure Functions for Visual Studio Code. The Azure Functions for Visual Studio Code extension allows to create new projects and functions from a template, to debug function apps locally, to view and to deploy Azure functions, to start, stop and restart functions and has Intellisense support for the json-project files. ...