If you have an application, instrumenting it with something like Application Insights to emit useful data is something I cannot espouse the benefits of enough. As a service, however, Application Insights can offer other benefits, such as Availability Tests to tell you if the application is accessible to your users. The …

We use the SharePoint Online Content Type Hub extensively as the central location to create, manage and distribute content types throughout our SharePoint Online tenant. We recently saw an issue with the distribution of one of the content types defined in the Content Type Hub which had a specific PowerPoint template …

I recently noticed that some of the Microsoft Teams that we had in use exhibited different behaviour to others that had been created more recently. ‘Recently’ (for varying definitions of ‘recent’) created Teams allowed users to edit and delete their messages, whereas a few older Teams did not. The older Teams were all …

I’ve had a number of cases where it would have been useful to be able to deploy files to a logged-in user’s profile on Windows using Configuration Manager (SCCM), but due to the context in which the ‘installation’ runs (i.e. the local system), using parameters such as %AppData% in a batch file doesn’t work, and this …

Everyone installing Hyper-V servers is installing them as Server Core servers, right? I recently hit an issue configuring APC’s PowerChute Network Shutdown (PCNS) software on a Server Core installation of Windows Server 1809 (the most recent release of the semi-annual channel) whereby while the installation appeared to …

A pull request for Chris Gardner's WebApplicationProxyDSC is now inbound after a frustrating week of trying to automate the configuration of ADFS and WAP on a Server 2016 lab. With Server 2016, the PowerShell commands to configure the ADFS and WAP servers include switches to specify a non-default port. I need to do …

Design of SharePoint content Types for SharePoint, and in particular SharePoint Online is very important. Care must be taken to ensure that the design is appropriate for the environment as changes made later can impose significant management overheads. In particular, if a Content Type is put to use (I.e. is assigned to …

At Black Marble we have been migrating our DevTest labs to from on-premises TFS Lab Management to a mixture of on-premise and Azure hosted Lability defined Labs as discussed by Rik Hepworth on his blog. I have only been tangentially involved in this effort until recently, consuming the labs but not creating the …

As part of the continued improvement to my CI/CD process I needed to provide a means so that whenever I test my Generate Release Notes Task, within it’s CI/CD process, new commits and work item associations are made. This is required because the task only picks up new commits and work items since the last successful …

I was recently performing a SharePoint 2013 to 2016 farm upgrade and noticed an interesting issue when performing tests on content databases to be migrated to the new system. As part of the migration of a content database, it’s usual to perform a ‘Test-SPContentDatabase’ operation against each database before attaching …