**Microsoft recently announced the Public Preview of the ability to run PowerShell code in an Azure Function. This means that the PowerShell code will run in a Platform-as-a-Service solution, completely serverless! You pay only for the time that you use the solution and you don’t have to manage the underlying infrastructure! In this blog post, I will show a practical example of how to use an Azure Function in combination with an Azure Logic App.** After publishing a blog post, I always want to share the post as quickly as possible on Twitter & LinkedIn. ...

**After passing the AZ-300 exam and being not too happy about the new exam experience, I liked this exam much better. Let me explain why.** In my blog post about the AZ-300, I talked about the fact that you can run out of time quickly and that the exam was lacking transparency about the amount and type of questions you still have to do when compared to the time you have left. ...

This morning I passed the AZ-300 exam. To be honest, I was confident that I failed the exam. Especially because I ran out of time with only 80 - 90 %. In this blog post, I will explain you the good and the bad of this exam and the exam experience. The Good Labs are a great way to test knowledge The labs that I had to take in the exam where stable and solid. You get access to a Windows VM with a browser on it which automatically opens the Azure Portal. ...

**People who follow me on Twitter might have noticed that I’m working more and more with Microsoft Flow. Microsoft Flow allows me to create simple automations (like IFTTT) and to create a bridge between services like Office 365 and my home automation with Home Assistant. Recent changes to the pricing model made me decide to move away from Microsoft Flow, back to Azure Logic Apps. In this blog post, I’ll explain how easy it is to move your flows to Azure Logic Apps.** In my flows I’ve been a heavy user of the HTTP Trigger and HTTP Request actions, because I’m relying mostly on REST API calls to perform the automation tasks. ...

**Since a couple of months I’ve been using Microsoft Teams as my daily driver. This means that I’m fully migrated from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. One of the things I’m missing is notifications without the content of the message. (also called message preview) Especially when I’m presenting my screen during a meeting, I don’t want the meeting participants to read my Teams messages. Disabling notifications and relying on the taskbar icon didn’t work for me, as I’ve missed several messages per week. ...

This morning I passed both the TOGAF 9 Part 1 & Part 2 to become TOGAF Certified! According to TOGAF, this “is to provide validation that, in addition to the knowledge and comprehension of TOGAF 9 Foundation, the Candidate is able to analyze and apply this knowledge”. As I’ve spent a large amount of effort and time into this, I’m really happy with this result! Read this post if you want to learn more about TOGAF and taking the exam. ...

In this blog post, I will show you how to create an RSS Feed/WordPress Post Reminder with Azure Logic Apps, which you can use to post to various Social Media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ve probable seen a post like this with a reminder to check out my yesterday’s blog post: https://twitter.com/DevSecNinja/status/1084815812232388613?s=20 This is all works automatically by using Azure and Azure Logic Apps. ...

This year already started great for me by passing the AZ-102: Microsoft Azure Administrator Certification Transition exam! This transition exam is based on content from the AZ-100 and AZ-101 exams. In this blog post, I will share some tips that really helped me passing the exam. https://twitter.com/DevSecNinja/status/1080433831667265541?s=20 As I’m working with Azure a lot during my work as an Azure Architect/Engineer, the platform is just too big to be able to master everything. ...

The Dutch Government is aiming on providing smart meters to every household before Q4 2020. All the smart meters need to comply to DSMR (Dutch Smart Meter Requirements). DSMR allows us to read data from the smart meter by using a cable. In this guide, I will explain how I got this to work with Home Assistant. Prerequisites Home Assistant (Hass.io) running on a Raspberry Pi One of the supported smart meters. I’m using the Landis+Gyr ZMF110 with DSMR 4.2 from Liander A cable to connect from USB on your Pi to the smart meter (Optionally) a second Raspberry Pi running on a Linux distro to send the data over the network to your Hass.io Pi Connect your Raspberry Pi to the smart meter Insert the USB cable in the Raspberry Pi and the other side of the cable into your smart meter. A data connection should now be established. ...

My last blog post was all about getting Hass.io (or HassIO) installed on the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. This guide starts right where we left off: configuring Home Assistant to work with the configuration files we already have from Home Assistant running on Raspbian. Below are the steps I took in a nutshell. Install and open the Configurator Add-on on Hass.io to make sure you can always open the web UI to change your configurations. Create a snapshot so you can always go back to this point in time. Cut/paste the BaseURL and SSL settings from the configuration.yaml on your old Pi to the new configuration.yaml on your new Pi by using the Configurator add-on. Make sure that you have an SSH session open to the old Pi on the IP address of the old Pi, so you can still copy/paste the contents of various configurations. Also stop the Home Assistant service on your old Raspberry Pi and change any port forwarding rules in your firewall or DNS settings. (Depending on your old setup) Got your Home Assistant ready under the original URL? Create a new snapshot, just to be sure. Start copying the contents of your configuration.yaml and other relevant YAML configurations by grabbing it from SSH and pasting it in the Configurator Add-on. I was surprised to see that all the modules I’ve used before on Raspbian are working fine on Hass.io! So don’t worry too much about that. Go to your Hass.io URL and confirm the dashboard is back to where it was before. Let me know if this guide helped you out! Cheers!