Wictor Wilen

ngrok is a fantastic tool, that I use on an everyday basis when building solutions cloud. It allows me to host and debug an application locally and at the same time host the website or API’s with a publicly accessible https endpoint. As I work quite a bit with Microsoft Teams development this is essential when building bots (Azure Bot Service cannot talk to localhost) or building out Teams Tabs with SSO. However, how good this tool might be, there are several firewalls, security clients and companies that actively block ngrok. Ngrok does establish a tunnel from the public internet to your machine, and you should be aware of that - it is a security risk. Most notably ngrok has been used as tools for malicious attacks.

When you’re working with building applications or services there’s always a need to store configuration. For Azure there’s a great service called Azure App Configuration that allows you to securely store, manage and retrieve configuration settings. It’s a perfect service for both smaller and larger projects and it keeps your configuration in control, and of course secured and audited. When I’m building solutions using node I typically start with storing my configuration in a local .env file and then use the dotenv package to import those settings into process.env properties. That makes it super easy to work with configurations, settings and change them as needed without fiddling through all the code and replace. Since I always add the .env file to my .gitignore I also reduce the risk of sharing secrets and passwords. When moving this from my local dev machine into Azure I have historically just used the Web App application settings. That works really great and is a simple solution to have these settings being read runtime, the web app only needs to be restarted to pick the new changes up.

Such a great week this is, after being accepted into the Microsoft Regional Director community earlier this week, today marks the 11th time I’m awarded with the Microsoft MVP for Office Apps & Services. Dear Wictor Wilen, We’re once again pleased to present you with the 2020-2021 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in recognition of your exceptional technical community leadership. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in the following technical communities during the past year:

I’m incredibly proud to announce that I’ve been accepted into the Microsoft Regional Director program. The Microsoft Regional Director (RD) program is a global community of passionate technology thought leaders, where Microsoft once a year appoints a small set of leaders as Regional Directors, to serve on a two years basis. It’s a fantastic opportunity for me to play a small role in this group of people - that I look up to as leaders, superstars, humans..and friends.

While migrating my site from Orchard to Hugo I wanted to add some JavaScripts. Specifically I wanted that to power the search experience using some simple JavaScripts. However, I’ve grown quite fond over using React (and TSX/JSX) to any kind of user experiences for the web and I did not want to go back to pure JavaScript or use some DOM manipulation scripts such as jQuery. Hugo, that I use for my static site, does not directly have support for transpiling React. But with a few small steps you can make React transpiling as a part of your Hugo build and use React for your user experiences. Yes, this might not be new to everyone, but I did not find a direct guide on how to set this up - specifically for Hugo noobs such as me. So here’s a quick guide on how to get started with Hugo and React.

When refurbishing my site and setting up Github workflows and actions I wanted to have a way to correlate any of my deployments of code to the statistics I have on the site and any telemetry/data in Application Insights. Application Insights has an API to add Annotations in your timeline. It adds an entry into your Application Insights instance at a specific time with a set of comments. This annotation is visible throughout many reports such as Sessions, Failures, Events and more, see below.

Eventually time caught up with me, and with the help of some isolation, boring weather and some recent announcements from Microsoft Build, I had to go and update my/this web site. It was way overdue and it’s been on my to-do list for far to long - for a number of reasons. First of all this site has been hosted on Orchard on Azure since 2012 - without any hiccups. The setup was a dynamic web site, using Orchard, which was a state-of-the-art web and blogging CMS at that point in time. I loved the architecture and how they built it on .NET! However this setup required me to do upgrades once in a while, and eventually I stopped doing that due to some big changes, that I did not have time to mess with. So I let it be. Secondly this was running on Azure Web Site and using Azure SQL Server for backend - although fairly cheap, not optimal for my blogging cadence and the content. The interwebs has moved on and there are also more or less requirements to have your site on HTTPS, which I did not have previously. And last but not least I suck at design so I cringed to do an update.

Hey, I’m back. Long time since I did some writing on this blog. But I needed to get this one out. As you all know I’m a huge fan of the Microsoft Teams extensibility model and now with the SSO support for Tabs, it’s even easier to create integrated experiences for your end users where they can consume data and information from the Microsoft Graph or LOB systems. I recently did a small appearance at the Microsoft 365 PnP webcast showcasing how to configure and scaffold a Microsoft Teams project that uses this new SSO Tab feature. You can watch the recording here:

Happy Easter everyone, I have fantastic news. After seven preview versions (and even a skipped version - 2.6) the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.7.0 is now available for you to use! Just like tons of others do; there’s been over 6.000 downloads of the generator, it’s generating a handful of new Teams projects every day and it’s done from all parts of the world! Join the movement!