If you are building an application or a website today, all the rage is to create your site with Continuous integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to make life easier. And why wouldn't you want to do this? It is all about automation, making your life easier and simply getting code from development, testing to production in a faster process. In todays post we are going to look at using Azure DevOps to deploy code from a source to Azure Static Web Apps. If you are not familiar with Azure Static Web App you should take a moment to read the announcement. Via Microsoft: Azure Static Web Apps is a ..read more

Building applications in today's world requires real-time web functionality to applications. This used to be considered an extra, a nice to have, but in todays development world it is now considered required. So what is a real-time web functionality? The most common example is a real-time chat application. But it is so much more and much deeper in todays web environment. On a given day, you most likely interact with dozens of websites and I would wager the vast majority of them have some element of real-time communications. For example, Facebook and Twitter has real-time notifications in the b ..read more

Creating amazing applications in Microsoft Teams is getting easier and easier each day. There is an ever increasing number of code samples and more on the internet. One area that doesn't get a lot of attention is the backend development you might need. This isn't Microsoft Teams specific of course, you could use this for any front-end application (React, Angular, etc) or may be needed in your next desktop application. Recently I've been working on a new Teams Application and the amount of data is LARGE. We are not talking 100's or even 1000's of rows but in the 100,000's of rows of data. As th ..read more

Creating amazing applications in Microsoft Teams is getting easier and easier each day. There is an ever increasing number of code samples and more on the internet. One area that doesn't get a lot of attention is the backend development you might need. This isn't Microsoft Teams specific of course, you could use this for any front-end application (React, Angular, etc) or may be needed in your next desktop application. Recently I've been working on a new Teams Application and the amount of data is LARGE. We are not talking 100's or even 1000's of rows but in the 100,000's of rows of data. As th ..read more

Microsoft has done an amazing job of detailing how the Microsoft Teams VDI client is installed to the workstations. On the Microsoft Docs page they also detail all of the limitations of the VDI Client. This list of limitations has gotten smaller over time but one of the largest is the lack of updates. From the docs: "With per-machine installation, automatic updates is disabled. This means that to update the Teams app, you must uninstall the current version to update to a newer version. With per-user installation, automatic updates is enabled. For most VDI deployments, we recommend you deploy T ..read more

Microsoft has announced the release of TypeScript 4.0. The latest version of its open-source JavaScript superset. For those unfamiliar with TypeScript, Microsoft's Daniel Rosenwasser explains it, "If you’re not familiar with TypeScript, it’s a language that builds on top of JavaScript by adding syntax for static types. The idea is that by writing down the types of your values and where they’re used, you can use TypeScript to type-check your code and tell you about mistakes before you run your code (and even before saving your file)." TypeScript is one of those tools that you don't know you nee ..read more

At Microsoft Build 2020, the Teams Development team announced the preview version of the Teams Toolkit. I've been fortunate to see this go from napkin stage all the way to general availability. I thought it would be fun to take it out for a quick test. You can read all about on Microsoft Docs. My Project This should be a very easy project. I have a project currently in process that spans multiple GitHub repositories. We do all of issue tracking via GitHub. For every project that has a user experience tied to it, we build in a very simple "feedback" form so users (internal, external, whomever ..read more

Microsoft is rolling out a new update to the Office.com website and for those who have been using Microsoft Teams for the past three-plus years you will notice it looks VERY familiar. If you have not seen the update roll into your productive tenant here is a picture of it. (I have not seen it land in my production tenant but I am sure it's coming soon.) New Stuff Is Coming Let me first start by saying that I love Teams. I believe deep in my heart that Microsoft has absolutely nailed it. It is a game changer and the world will be forever different because of Teams. But that does not mean it is ..read more

This has been on my "to-do" for nearly a year and I've decided that I can no longer wait any longer and the time is now. So today I'm going to start working on My First Teams App - Validator for Teams. What Is Validator? Many years ago I wrote a web app to help individuals and customers with their Skype for Business Deployments. This app is still available(https://skypevalidator.com/) for those who are on Lync/Skype but one has to admit that it's use has gone down with Microsoft Teams over the years. One of the items I wrote as part of Skype Validator was a tool to do simple HTTP/HTTPS Checks ..read more

2020 is the year of writing code. Writing the code is only the first step. Documentation of your new code is critical. Regardless if the project is for you or a team documentation is a must. What Is Good API Documentation As I've had to interact with more and more products outside of Skype for Business you will move from old COM based tools to REST based API's instead. This is what the modern world is built upon. If you are using a service like Microsoft Graph you may be familiar with Graph Explorer but their real documentation for 1.0 endpoints would be found here. The documentation will cont ..read more