Nishant Rana

Azure Architecture and Management – Introduction

Below are few key points on Azure architecture and management

Check availability of Azure products region-wise

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/services/

Below we have filtered it to see products available in UAE

We can also filter it further if we are looking for a specific product or service.

We can refer to the Data residency document to see where the data is being stored

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/data-residency/

We can use the Pricing Calculator for estimation.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

A resource inside Azure can be thought of manageable item in Azure that includes Virtual Machines, Web App, Database, etc.
A resource group is a container (contains metadata) of the resources.
It is through ARM – Azure Resource Manager the resources within Azure are managed.

Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, REST APIs are different ways of interacting with Azure Resource Manager.

Azure CLI – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli?view=azure-cli-latest
Azure PowerShell – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azure/install-az-ps?view=azps-4.7.0
Azure REST API – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/
Azure SDK (.NET) – https://azure.github.io/azure-sdk/releases/latest/dotnet.html

Within Azure Portal, we can use Azure Cloud Shell to run PowerShell or CLI commands.

It will ask us to create a storage account if there aren’t any

To implement Infrastructure-as-Code, Azure has Azure Resource Manager Templates which are written in JSON, that uses a declarative syntax to define infrastructure and configuration for Azure resources for automating deployments.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/templates/overview

Azure Advisor is a recommendation service that analyzes the configurations and usage of the Azure Resources and provides recommendations / best practices on different categories to optimize the Azure Deployment.

The advisor can be configured to run only on specific resources along with the option to edit the existing rules and set up alerts.

We can also use Azure Mobile App

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/azure-portal/mobile-app/

to monitor the health and status of Azure resources, run commands to manage Azure resources, etc.

Reference – Pluralsight Course – Microsoft Azure Services and Concepts

Hope it helps..

Sub grid and form tabs improvements in Power Apps Mobile App

There are couple of improvements in user experience for sub grids and form tab in Power Apps Mobile app.

Check other blog posts on Release 2020 Wave 2

Headers are more protruding for sub grid to separate it from rest of the sections of the form.
There is also an option (+ New Case – below) to add new record inline for empty sub grids.

Commands on sub grid opens as a drawer from the bottom of the screen.

Form tabs can be scrolled horizontally and selecting the tab automatically adjusts the header.

Hope it helps..

Displaying SharePoint RichText field as HTML interpreted in SSRS

HowCanIHelpYou?

SSRS Reports have a placeholder property HTML – Interpret HTML tags as styles. That property allows you to use HTML tags while displaying report.

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We have to face the problem when we want to display SharePoint`s RichText field content is SSRS Report. RichText field may contain some characters that are stored different in SharePoint DB and cannot be interpreted by SSRS as HTML (eg. :, &, {, <, >, list elements, etc.)

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Microsoft Azure / Cloud Computing – Introduction

Cloud Computing enables companies to consume a complete resource – such as virtual machine, storage, or an application as a utility – just like electricity – rather than having to build and maintain computing infrastructure in-house.

Cloud provider provides the cloud infrastructure which is shared across multiple clients. Clients can select which service to use and only need to pay for that service, which is billed on-demand.

Cloud provider takes care of high availability (disk failure, power supply) and disaster recovery (natural or human disaster like fire, flood, etc.)

Advantages of using cloud computing

Rapid elasticity, only pay for the services used, reliability, economics of scale, etc.

Azure Regions Interactive Map

https://build5nines.com/map-azure-regions/

Types of Cloud Computing Services.

IaaS – Infrastructure as a service – Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Storage.
PaaS – Platform as a service – Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Azure Automation.
SaaS – Software as a service – Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Power Platform.

Types of Cloud computing deployment models.

Hope it helps..

PowerAutomate: Self-reference is not supported when updating the value of variable

Ajit Patra

We often come across requirements in which we want to add certain value to the same variable e.g. for integer variable, x=x+5 or for string variable, test=test+”additional”.

We were trying to achieve the same thing using PowerAutomate. However, while doing this using Set Variable action, we got an error saying “Self-reference is not supported when updating the value of variable”.

Below is what we were trying to do inside Apply to each action and the expression is: add(variables(‘Service Delivery Type Total Amount’),items(‘Apply_to_each_Service_Delivery_Type’)?[‘dxc_amount’])

As this is not possible using PowerAutomate at the moment, we achieved it using another variable of same type in the middle as shown below:

And, inside Apply to each action, we added the following Set Variable actions:

Expression for the above action: **add(variables(‘Dummy Service Delivery Type Amount’), items(‘Apply_to_each_Service_Delivery_Type’)?[‘dxc_amount’])**

Hope it helps !!

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Use custom browser protocol to launch desktop applications from Dynamics 365

Recently we had a requirement to launch a .NET desktop application installed in the user’s machine from within Dynamics 365 and also pass parameters to it.

One of the ways of implementing is by using the Custom URL Protocol.

Modern browsers and operating systems allow us to implement a custom URL protocol and register an external application to handle it. So when a user clicks on the link that uses that custom URL Protocol, the browser will open the application that is registered.

Check a few examples here

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/launch-resume/launch-app-with-uri

So, let us start and register our Custom URL Protocol.

Below is the source code for creating a new key


var applicationPath = @"C:\MyParamApp\MyApp\bin\Debug\MyApp.exe";
var KeyTest = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey("Software", true).OpenSubKey("Classes", true);
RegistryKey key = KeyTest.CreateSubKey("OpenAppP");
key.SetValue("URL Protocol", "OpenAppP");
key.CreateSubKey(@"shell\open\command").SetValue("", "\"" + applicationPath + "\" \"%1\"");

Here OpenAppP is the protocol name and the application path that holds the path of application that we want to execute.

For key.CreateSubKey we have specified %1 for passing the parameter.

If we do not want to pass the parameter then we do not need to append it.