Showing posts with label Tooling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tooling. Show all posts

Sunday 8 August 2021

Tools for Architects

Overview:  As an architect we use multiple tools, it's a good idea to standardise tool usage especially in larger businesses. It's pretty common to se architects using different tool for drawing architecture diagrams (viso, draw.io,...)

Common Drawing tool I've seen architects use:

  • Visio
  • Draw.io
  • Balsamiq (my odd tool of choice that offers low fidelity, alternatives are Figma which is high fidelity for UI and Ux design, issue is end users thing its the website and get confused, Axure is also a nice Ux prototyping tool).
  • Lucidchart (competitor products: Visio, Miro, Balsamiq, ) Lucidscall can pull diagrams from architecture.  The is also a cool python git project that allows you to specify a diagram using Python and it draws the diagram and you can also then use the Python code to provision the infrastructure.
  • Miro (great for sharing).  Similar to Lucidcharts, with good integration, I tend not to introduce Miros as I use Teams and it's whiteboarding.  FigJam is pretty good for brainstorming from the makers of Figma.
  • PowerPoint (sic. but it happens and some architects are good with it)

Tools for Retrieving Azure Architecture and creating documentation:

Enterprise Architecture Tooling:

  • Sparx
  • Archimate

Dev Tooling I use a lot:

  • Visual Studio
  • SQL Server Management Studio 
  • Postman/Swagger

WIP


Saturday 10 July 2021

Modeling and working with data on the Dataverse within the Power Platform

The Common Data Model - Is an industry agreed approach to storing commonly used data.  Use it to store applications across your company/organisation.  Results in a single source of truth instead of multiple copies with data contained in different schema's.

Two types of relationships namely: 1:N and N:N (Dataverse hides the associate entity/intersect entity that is created in the background).  

Use "Option Sets" for small static data and use "Lookups" for larger or changing data.  In Multiselect Option sets for N:N relationships, rather use "Lookups".

SSMS can be used to view data using T-SQL, better to use "SQL 4 CDS" as it provides a full ability to work with data within the XrmToolBox.

XrmToolBox - is a 3rd party download that has a ton of contributed tools and there are good options for modelling data.  This is a collection of tools that are unbelievably useful and get continually updated and new tools added.

Excel and browser plugins - Can be used to import/export data and there are some nice Edge/Browser plugins to help such as "Level up for Dynamics 365/Power Apps".  Level up for Dynamics 365/Power Apps is a fantastic tool that I encourage any developer to add to Edge or Chrome as an extension.

Level up for Dynamics 365/Power Apps Browser extension
Dynamics 365 Power Pane Browser extension.

Dynamics 365 Power Pane is also a useful extension shown below:
Power Pane options

The built in browser Dataverse management tool is super easy to use to model your Common Data Model further.

Saturday 10 March 2018

SharePoint Tooling 2018

On a development/local machine, I have complied this list of tools that I'm likely to use but it completely depends on the development project, approach, and technologies used.  This post lists tools I commonly use as of March 2018:

SharePoint Tools:
  1. SharePoint Inspect
  2. SharePoint Designer
  3. Visual Studio 2017
  4. SharePoint Search Query Tool (CodePlex now PnP)
  5. SharePoint Manager
  6. CAML Builder
Developer Tools:
  1. NodeJS
  2. NPM
  3. Yeoman, 
  4. GULP
  5. Webpack
Design Tools:
  1. Balsamiq (My favourite) - Screens and interaction flow
  2. Updated 2019/12/01 - visual-paradigm.com online drawing tool
  3. Axure - Prototyping
  4. Figma
  5. Microsoft Blend - Screens and interaction flow
  6. Visio - Architecture
  7. MS Access to ERD design
Other Tools:
  1. Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code
  2. SnagIT - Basic video recording with audio and annotate screenshots.
  3. Office & OneNote
  4. NotePad++, add the compare dll plugin
  5. Grammarly
  6. Slack or Teams
  7. Yopmail or mailinator - useful for creating accounts for testing (beware these can be a security risk as anyone can guess you temporary emails) they are deleted after a few days.
  8. BrowserStack
Networking:
  1. Wireshark
  2. Fiddler
  3. DeveloperTool IE & Chrome
  4. Burp
  5. Telnet
  6. Postman
Source Control:
  1. TFS
  2. TFS online
  3. GIT

Sunday 6 August 2017

Common KQL Search Helper


Overview: I am forever forgetting the intricacies of using search and this post is a short note for common searches I use.  Ensure the search is working against "Everything":

Find items under a specific url (Path)
path:https://www.radimaging.com/sites/*

To only see team site (webtemplate)
webtemplate:STS

To see Content Types e.g. task list items
spcontenttype:Task

Example used in a search box for using a wildcard on the title
ClientSector:Finance AND Title:*Paul*

You can use the query approach for any Managed property to refine your search.  Example:
http://radimaging.net/sites/healthcare/_api/search/query?querytext='ClientSector:Finance*'&startrow=2&rowlimit=500

ClientSector is a Managed Property (property bag) at the root site collection level of each site collection.
startrow is telling my query to skip the first 2 results
rowlimit is telling the search to return up to 500 results (max is 500, default is 50 if not specified).

Similar querying can be done using the search results page in the browser:
https://radimaging.net/Pages/results.aspx#k=ClientSector%3AFinance*#s=105
Client Sector MP search equivalant in the browser
s = startrow

It is a good idea to have a query tool (SharePoint Search Query Tool V2.7) to help build up queries and validate query logic.  I have built consoles to do this in CSOM in the past or used PowerShell with CSOM which is pretty good.
https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-Tools/tree/master/Solutions/SharePoint.Search.QueryTool (PNP Tools GitHub)  as of 10 Dec 2018 version 2.8.2 is the latest version.

Examples:
querytext='SharePoi*'
querytext='ManagedPropertyCreated:Test*'&startrow=10&rowlimit=500&sortlist='created:descending'&clienttype='ContentSearchRegular'


Read More:
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Query-SharePoint-2013-373ff97a
http://nikcharlebois.com/get-search-results-in-sharepoint-2013-using-powershell/