Flow parasites on ifttt

Posted on May 26, 2017 by erictummers

My blog posts are automatically published to yammer. When yammer was independent this worked like a charm. Then Microsoft bought yammer and the ifttt channel stopped working.

With the Office365 channel and the e-mail to yammer it worked again. Only for Microsoft to introduce an approve step. This means:

  1. wait for approval request in outlook,
  2. open login page to office 365,
  3. fill e-mail and wait for redirect to company login page,
  4. fill e-mail (again) and password,
  5. See the yammer post.

Now with Flow this would be automatic again. Let’s try this with this post.

as expected Flow can publish to yammer with more options and less hurdles … embrace and extend, not really.

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Scrum Master Skills

Posted on May 26, 2017 by erictummers

We’re working on our project for some months now. Time to freshen up on scrum. For this we use the Scrum Master Skills course on pluralsight.

Once each sprint we sit down as a team for an hour. We play and pause the video and discuss how this applies to us. Some tips can be applied right away and others go on the backlog.

rawpixel-com-250087

Image courtesy of rawpixel / unsplash.com

Every project is different and every team is different. Even after 15 sprints we are finetuning. Using the experience of others helps us to be a better scrum team.

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Update statistics from stored procedure (needs alter table permission)

Posted on May 24, 2017 by erictummers

Today instead of the beautiful information our reports displayed this ugly error

  • An error has occurred during report processing. (rsProcessingAborted)
    • Query execution failed for dataset ‘StoredProcedure’. (rsErrorExecutingCommand)
      • For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors

If we had access to the report server machine this was easy to troubleshoot. But we don’t have access to the report server. We needed another approach.

Image courtesy of jesadaphorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image courtesy of jesadaphorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Looking through the changes from last night we noticed a small performance enhancement. In a stored procedure that prepares the data for the reports we added the following line:

UPDATE STATISTICS [dbo].[Fact]

In the Microsoft documentation it says you’ll need alter table permission to use update statistics. So we added another grant for the reporting service account.

GRANT EXECUTE ON [dbo].[proc_prepare4reporting] TO [SSRS]
GRANT ALTER ON [dbo].[Fact] TO [SSRS]

After the deployment the reports showed the beautiful information again.

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TypeLoadException

Posted on May 15, 2017 by erictummers

Introducing a new member to the team is always a good thing. This brings up problems that would stay under the radar otherwise. Our new tester experienced an application crash that we’ve never seen before.

Using the remote debugger we discovered the actual exception:

[TypeLoadException: Could not load type ‘System.Security.Claims.ClaimsIdentity’ from assembly ‘mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’.]

Turned out the newly installed machine was still on .NET Framework 4.0 and we target the 4.5 Framework in our build. Other testers have Visual Studio 2015 installed to use the Test Manager feature. That installs the 4.5 Framework on their machines. The new tester hadn’t yet installed anything.

Image courtesy of toonsteb / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image courtesy of toonsteb / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Our users will be on the .NET 4.0 Framework. So we changed the framework target to 4.0 in the project and the new bug was resolved and fixed. 😉

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My alternative to Pebble

Posted on April 25, 2017 by erictummers

About a year ago I backed the latest kickstarter project from Pebble. The battery life, the timeline and the support for my running app justified the purchase. But as we all know the device never made it to my wrist.

With some money to spare and my birthday coming up I decided to go for the Garmin Forerunner 235. It was favoured over the Apple Watch (yes I’m an Apple fan) because of the battery life and the fact that it is a running watch first and smart watch second. Both have build-in GPS but only the Garmin shows the status.

Garmin FR235

The smart features of the watch are limited to displaying the weather and your appointments, music control including volume and showing notifications. Everything is synced from the (i)Phone to the watch. No reply to messages or snooze of alerts. Pretty limited for a smart watch, but it works for me.

Looking at a message on my watch made me think of the pebble notifications I saw on youtube review, minus the animations. The screen looks like the same e-paper technology is used.

** But wait there is more **

Garmin has it’s own app platform called Connect IQ. There are over 1000 apps in the store you can download and install. The SDK is free and everybody is encouraged to develop something great.

In the end I’m very happy with my watch. Still sad Pebble is no more.

In-dept FR235 review by Dc Rainmaker

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