My blog site DotNetMafia.com has been around for quite a long time.  It started as a conversation at a bar by Kyle Kelin, the Dot Net Mafia's original purpose was to provide a site to rank and review recruiters known for being shady and lying to both candidates and clients.  That concept never took off but we decided to use the name sometime around 2008 to provide a blogging platform for a group of us including Kevin Williams, Tony Kilhoffer, James Ashley, Kyle Kelin, and Cory Robinson.  For a time, we had a nice active blogging platform and many of us participated.  With t ..read more

For those that know me, you might have heard about my extensive use of Ionic Framework, a mobile app platform, to build various side projects including BrewZap and HappenZap. If you aren’t familiar with Ionic Framework, it’s a node.js based development framework for mobile apps. Ionic was originally built using AngularJS and then modern versions of Angular. With it’s recent release of 4.0.0, Ionic has made the shift to web components. This has allowed Ionic to support other frameworks such as React and Vue. I’ve been trying to get Ionic Framework to work inside SPFx on and off for about two ye ..read more

If you have ever used Office Fabric with SPFx, you may have found yourselves struggling.  You quickly learned than previous version of SPFx did not work with version 6+ of Office.  Instead you had to use the LTS version of Office Fabric which varies significantly from version 6.  What make this such a pain point is that there isn't really any documentation on the Office Fabric site that tells you that.  Instead you just installed it, tried it out, and couldn't figure out why things weren't working until you did an Internet search.  In addition what made things even har ..read more

On any consumer-facing platform where users can submit content that will be seen by the public, it's a good idea to have some level of content moderation.  Manual content moderation using humans is tedious and labor-intensive.  Luckily, Azure Content Moderator, part of Azure Cognitive Services, provides us with some AI capability to potentially detect language that might be offensive.  It's actually quite easy to get started with as well. First, you'll want to create a new Content Moderator in your Azure Portal.  The options are fairly straight forward based upon region, re ..read more

The yo tools make it rather easy now to add additional web parts and extensions to your SPFx projects.  However, I recently ran across this issue which caused me weeks of pain.  The scenario starts with this. You create a new SPFx project with a web part and deploy it.  Everything works great.  Now, you go and create an application customizer to add your own navigation or footer.  Here is where you start to run into issues.  You can add the application customizer easily enough with yo, but when you increment your version number in package-solution.json and then de ..read more

If you are still connecting to an on-premises Exchange Server in Outlook for Mac OS X, you may receive the following error even though your password is correct: Mail could not be received at this time. The server for account "" returned the error "Login failure: unknown user name or bad password."  Your username/password or security settings may be incorrect.  Would you like to try re-entering your password? Outlook will continue to prompt you several times as it attempts to download your messages.  The problem is that it usually will never stop even if you click the option Rem ..read more

Recently, I posted about the error (TypeError: Object doesn't support property or method 'from') you received in Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) when you didn't include the necessary polyfills for PnP JS to work.  To resolve the error, previously you had to include the following Polyfills to provide support for things like proxy, fetch, and map. import "core-js/modules/es6.promise" import "core-js/modules/es6.array.iterator.js" import "core-js/modules/es6.array.from.js" import "whatwg-fetch" import "es6-map/implement" Now with PnPJS 1.2.4, this has been simplified a bit with a new single pack ..read more

Apple recently gave developers the ability to sign up testers using just a URL in TestFlight.  Previously, it required the developer to manage a list of E-mail addresses which quickly becomes unwieldy.  If you are interested in testing pre-release versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, and more then check out the links below.  You first need to install the TestFlight app on your iOS device.  This is how you install pre-release apps in iOS.  In fact, all of the links you see today need to be accessed directly from your iPhone or iPad.  Click on any of the links below to ..read more

We were discussing build times in #ionic-questions Slack channel today and Mike noted that you should be on Node v10.  Apparently, the @LTS has some bugs that are affecting performance.  If you haven't upgraded and plan to do any work with Ionic v4.0, I recommend it.  It significantly improves build and refresh tine.  Specifically, I installed v10.12.0.  ..read more

The  Fabric React DetailsList component is a great way to display your tabular data when building an SPFx web part.  It's nice, but if you have a lot of rows in your list, you might need a sticky header so that you can see which column you are looking at.  As a developer building out this scenario for the first time, you might run into guidance and a code sample from the ScrollablePane documentation.  I found this hard to find because I would expect this example to be linked to the DetailsList documentation.  This will get you up and going fairly quickly.  However ..read more