Reinstall Modern apps via PowerShell

As of late, there are a couple of Store apps which just won’t install on any of my Windows 10 machines (One Commander and Open Live Writer in case you are interested). The message shown is: The error code is 0x80073CF9, in case you need it. If you do a search on the error number you’ll find numerous posts and articles explaining on how this error might be solved. As it happens, the error also occurs on Windows Phone/Mobile systems. Read more →

Custom deployment steps for an Azure App Service

I’ve just started setting up some continuous deployment for my personal websites. All of the sites are hosted within Azure App Services and the sources are located on either GitHub or BitBucket. By having the source code located on a public accessible repository (be it private or public), it’s rather easy to connect Azure to these locations. On my day-job I come across a lot of web- and desktop applications which also need continuous integration and deployment steps in order for them to go live. Read more →

Deleting NPM folders when path is too long

When doing modern web development you will probably have to start using NPM sooner, rather than later. Not a big deal of course, since it’s a great addition to the frontend development environment. However, most NPM packages have quite a bit of dependencies to other packages. All of these dependencies get pulled towards your system also. Still not a big problem as you want a working solution. The problem arises when you are on a Windows environment, there are a lot of dependencies and you want to delete a project folder on your system. Read more →

Change the password policy of your Azure AD accounts

For our automated deployments we have several Azure Organizational accounts in place. These are created within the Azure Active Directory. Because these accounts are meant for services, we don’t want them to inherit the default password policy for renewing their passwords every X days. Lucky for us, you can configure this via PowerShell. A short how-to is written on MSDN. The thing that isn’t written (or referenced) over there is how to run the MSOL cmdlets. Read more →

Different Azure PowerShell modules for managing single resources or groups

While creating the PowerShell scripts for automatic deployment of the project’s Azure environment I discovered there are multiple Azure PowerShell modules. When you want to manage a single resource, such as storage accounts, websites, databases, virtual machines, and media services, you need the (default) Azure module. However, when you need to manage resource groups, you will need the AzureResourceManager module. This is useful information if you want to deploy new Azure websites with a specific hosting plan, like Basic or Standard. Read more →