This was today:

Don’t ask me why. Mid-life crisis maybe. I hate running. Did a halfy-halfy last year and thought what the fek.

Finished in a smidge over 5hrs; the first 18 miles or so were fine but -hit-the-wall and the remainder was a misery.

Great to do it, but never again. (Probably.)

The G… is important. Very important, in fact.

Why might you want to do this? Well, the ‘G’ indicates that the saw is compatible with the Bosch FSN guide rail system. G for ‘guide’… maybe.

Let’s back up. Over the last 2-3 years I’ve been steadily replacing my corded power tools with cordless. I have been a longtime Bosch user - Bosch Pro to be precise - for no good reason other than that was where I started, and I’ve never had any problems. I have a Bosch Pro drill that I’ve had for at least 20 years and other than it being the old style battery that now won’t really hold a charge, it’s still going strong. So a few years ago, I stumbled in to the Bosch 18v Lithium system and have been updating ever since.

Quick vid on installing a Westfalia towbar on my 2010 VW T5 Carvelle.

I use a mixture of Mac and Linux for most of my needs. I’ve run Windows virtual machines of same flavour or another but since .NET core 3 landed I’ve barely had to do even fire it up. There’s nowadays very little you can’t do in a non-Windows environment.

That doesn’t really extend (yet?) to remote administration of your Office365 tenant using Powershell.

I’m trying to configure some DNS bits for one of our domains that needs the Exchange Online V2 Powershell module. Come with me as I disappear down a rabbit hole of getting this working.

This is the third edition of this post. It was originally an intro to web scraping with Python (in Python 2) using the Requests library. It was then updated to cover some extra topics and also update for Python 3.

The scenario is to download the back catalogue of the excellent MagPi magazine which is published monthly and the PDF is available for free. More info on the background is in the original post.

However, since the original post a fair bit has changed: the MagPi website was updated so the scraping broke, Python has moved on and I found that despite downloading the issues, having them on a Pi meant I never actually read them because I forgot they were there!

Scenario: you have a Nintex workflow and you want to create an item in a list, where one of its column is a lookup column to another list.

Background: this took *too* long to figure out. I had an initial version of a workflow; it was actually a list workflow, running on an item which already had the lookup value I needed. Using the ‘Create Item’ action to create an item in a different list (which had the same lookup column) was straight-forward; you simply reference the current item in a list lookup

If you’re using ASP.NET Core built-in authentication to allow your users to sign up / login to your web application using alternative providers, Microsoft provides various out of the box, such as Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Chances are you have something like the following in your startup.cs

services.AddFacebook(options=> ...)

This works pretty nicely. All you need are you keys and secrets (hello Urban Cookie Collective) and all should rock.

However, an issue arises if your user clicks ‘Sign in with ’, which (if they are not already signed-in) takes them to that app to sign in, but if they then cancel that (e.g., clicking the ‘Not Now’ link on the Facebook screen) can result in a ghastly 500 error.

I still work on a lot of old technology. Today I was updating one of my client’s systems that consumes a (3rd party) web service - the service was moving from -gasp- anonymous auth to requiring a username and password. (Sent in plain text over non-SSL, mind, but… baby steps. I’m guessing this was good enough to close an audit point.)

The original implementation used the old Visual Studio ‘Web Service reference’ (for old style SOAP .asmx) which was replaced sometime later by ‘Service Reference’ and intended for anything implementing the WCF protocol. The old style didn’t support the WSE security stuff, whereas the newer did.

I recently posted some Powershell for bulk / batch emptying a SharePoint document library (https://www.matt-thornton.net/tech/sharepoint/bulk-delete-items-and-folders-from-sharepoint-document-library-using-powershell) which works nicely.

(As long as you remember that the Batch Delete XML syntax is incredibly fiddly and sensitive! Case is important and backticks are required to escape stuff.)

Anyway; it works great to empty an entire library, but you may prefer to just be tidying up really old stuff. Well, that’s what I was doing anyway, and therefore wanted to expand it a bit.

Continuing the theme of obscure SharePoint issues; this one on a new topic - Word Automation Services. A client has a new requirement to automate some documents and using Word templates and converting them to PDF all from a Nintex workflow would be… nifty. So away we go.

In Word, we created a Word document and then inserted some ‘Content Controls’ - have some options here, but for proof of concept, started with a simple text control. Then in the Developer tab of the ribbon, you can edit the properties of the control and give it a title. Save the document and upload to a document library in SP.