Gerry Hendrickx

I wanted a clean publish pipeline for my Hugo blog hosted on a Netcup VPS. The goal was simple: push to the main branch in Azure DevOps, and the live site update automatically. No manual builds, no FTP. The VPS already runs Pangolin, which bundles Traefik as its reverse proxy. That meant I had an existing Docker network and a working cert resolver to plug into. The missing pieces were the Hugo serving container, a deploy user with SSH access, and an Azure Pipeline to tie it together. ...

Intro The feature discussed in this blog post is experimental and subject to changes. Use at your own risk. Microsoft has recently introduced a new experimental feature to directly store the modifications to your canvas apps to Git. This offers multiple advantages: Multiple people can now work on the same power app at the same time. All changes are stored in Git and once you save, your colleague can synch the changes and pick off from where you left off. You have version control for your app. All saves are stored as a Git commit, meaning you have a full trace of all changes and modifications. If you mess up, you can go back easily. You can link this to CI/CD pipelines to automatically build and deploy versions of your app. Using Git version control really opens up Power Platform development to mature and proven good practices in software development. ...

Intro Microsoft offers a set of sample apps, built with the Power Platform, that you can install for your team in MS Teams. These apps serve as fully functioning apps, that you can use as they are, but mainly they can be used as a great example on how Microsoft wants us to build Dataverse for Teams apps. They are the most production-ready apps out there, built by Microsoft itself. ...

Intro So you decided to try to lose some excess weight. Good for you! You browse around on the internet and find thousands of studies and blogposts and advice on how to do so. But losing weight is a personal journey in which you need to find a balance between diet and not losing your mind. I’ve drafted some rules that worked for me. Again, it’s a personal thing, but to me these rules made a diet manageable, measurable and effective. I used these rules to lose 15 Kg over the course of 4 months. And they helped me get rid of weight on at least 3 occasions. (We’ll talk about why it always came back at the end…) It’s a set of tips and tricks, do with it what you want, and good luck! ...

Intro This is a follow-up post on Strava: Analyse your fitness using Power BI . Go read that post to understand the basics of the PowerBI connector for Strava and how to use it. Having a group of people to run together or to track your running activities together is a great motivator to get outside and exercise. Strava knows this and supports this by offering clubs. You can create a club for your running squad and get a view on your friends’ activities. It gamifies the running experience, with a leaderboard of who ran the most in the last week. You can even use it to plan runs together. ...

Intro Power Platform is an amazing set of low-code products. Although most people with a work account and a Microsoft 365 license can already make use of a lot of its functionalities, it can be difficult to find a clean environment to learn and experiment with the products. In many organizations, the IT department, rightfully, limits most of these tools. So what can you do if you do want to experiment, but your company doesn’t allow it or you don’t have a work account? Luckily Microsoft has got you covered. ...

Intro I have a love/hate relationship with running. I’ve always enjoyed it because it’s an activity that you can do whenever you want, for however long you want, with minimal equipment or transportation. You just step out the door, and start running. And you burn a lot of calories in the process! The hate part originates from the toll it takes on your body. A bad running form can cause injuries, and my past running experience has thought me that my knees are my weak point. Over the last couple of years, I have started running, got too excited and didn’t give my body enough time to steadily increase the mileage and get used to it. After a couple of months, my running habit went back to zero due to injuries. ...

When trying to set up my machine to run Azure Functions locally using Visual Studio Code, I ran across an error. After generating an empty HTTP-triggered Azure Function and running it, a big red error popped up in the terminal: func : File C:\Users\Hendr\AppData\Roaming\npm\func.ps1 cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system. For more information, see about_Execution_Policies at https:/go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135170. I happened to try the same thing on a different machine, and got exactly the same behavior. It seems that this is something that you need to resolve yourself on most Windows machines. Browsing to the URL provided in the error message, we get an explanation of what an Execution Policy is exactly: ...

Intro A big part of my role at Amaris is to explain to our (potential) customers what the value of modern solutions and services can be and how they can get started with them. In an effort to do this for chatbots and virtual assistants, I did a live webinar back in June 2020 to all of the interested customers and employees of Amaris. The webinar starts of with an explanation of what chatbots are and what the potential value for your company might be. After that we dive into the tools and platforms that Microsoft has provided us to easily build a chatbot. Of course, we did a live demo showing all of these tools in action and built a COVID19 (original right?) chatbot that can answer FAQ’s and can look up the number of confirmed cases in a country. ...

Intro I have been a subscriber to Office 365 from the moment I started my own company. When I set everything up back then, I of course needed a fitting domain name. This was the domain you’re currently visiting: HendrickxConsulting.com. Microsoft offered to purchase a domain name directly from the Office 365 portal, so with an eye on limiting the number of services I needed to keep track of, this seemed like a good option. ...