Blog

Custom Global Navigation Using SPFx Application Customizers

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SPFx Custom Applications

Out-of-the-box navigation in SharePoint Online has come a long way over the last number of years. Hub sites and hub site navigation provide much more customizability and consistency for navigating around a hub. However, modern intranets in SharePoint Online are generally made up of multiple hubs. Maintaining a consistent experience across all those hubs and sites can become a daunting task. While infinitely better than what we’ve had in the past, it still falls short of a truly unified and engaging experience. The ever-expanding lists of links can make it difficult to keep organized and make it difficult for users to find what they are looking for. In this blog, … Read more

Imaginet’s Experience with GitHub CoPilot 

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GitHub CoPilot

GitHub CoPilot is a new tool that uses artificial intelligence to help developers write code faster and better. It is powered by OpenAI Codex, a large-scale neural network that has been trained on billions of lines of public code. GitHub CoPilot can generate code snippets, tests, functions, and entire classes based on natural language descriptions or comments.  I have been curious about GitHub CoPilot ever since it was announced in 2021, but I was also skeptical about how well it could handle the complex and dynamic nature of software development. We started testing it around the middle of 2023 and had a mix of developer skill level (jr, int, expert) … Read more

Customizing Lists and Libraries with Custom Actions and Field Extensions Using SPFx 

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Using SPFx

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is relatively new, but we can’t stop talking about the benefits it has to offer. SPFx allows you to use modern web technologies and tools in your preferred development environment to build productive experiences and apps that are responsive and mobile-ready. In this blog, we are going to discuss how SPFx is fully customizable by using real-time examples as well as the benefits of using SPFx.    Custom Actions  A document library is a great place to store documents. However, managing documents as a part of a process sometimes requires additional manual steps. This can be setting metadata, applying labels, or starting an approval process. While all … Read more

Staying Current with Technology: The Benefits & Drawbacks

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Staying Current with Technology

Recently Microsoft announced several updates for their flagship technologies. These updates included a new version of .NET, .NET 8, as well as updates to Entity Framework Core, .NET Maui, and more. These updates are not limited to Microsoft either – Angular recently released Angular 17. Every year there are new updates and versions released for many development technologies, but should you be updating your applications every year? Here are a few points to consider:  New Features  The first and most obvious benefit is the new features updates provide. Generally, these features introduce benefits like quality-of-life changes for developers, which help development go faster, easier, or become more streamlined. Sometimes, new … Read more

SQL Saturday Part 2: Learning About Microsoft Fabric 

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Microsoft Fabric

I’ve been digging into Microsoft Fabric recently – well overdue, since it was first released about a year ago. At the recent SQL Saturday Atlanta event I attended in early February 2024, I took the opportunity to learn from the sessions and speakers that were discussing aspects of Fabric. Shabnam Watson, John Kerski, Stephanie Bruno, and Stacey Rudoy were some of the speakers I learned from. They showed me many other resources for learning more about Fabric, including a great blog by Sandeep Pawar, also known as https://fabric.guru/    I’ve been thinking about some of my clients and how Imaginet has architected their data analytics ecosystems, or how I might … Read more

My Trip to SQL Saturday Atlanta (BI Edition): Part 1 

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SQL Saturday

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend SQL Saturday Atlanta (BI edition), a free annual event for data professionals and enthusiasts held in Alpharetta Georgia. I spoke at this conference a year ago, and I was glad to have one of my abstracts selected so I could return this year.   SQL Saturdays are a great opportunity for me to volunteer and give back to the community with my experience, but also for me to learn from others. New speakers are encouraged, and the Data Speaker Community is a worldwide family of friends where everyone is welcomed. Keep your eye on https://sqlsaturday.com/ for events near you or calls for speaker … Read more

Enabling BitLocker Encryption with Microsoft Intune 

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Enabling Bitlocker

In today’s data-driven world, safeguarding sensitive information is paramount, especially with the increase in remote work following the pandemic and the rise in cyber threats. BitLocker, a robust encryption tool, plays a pivotal role in protecting your data from unauthorized access. In this blog post, we’ll explore the significance of enabling BitLocker, utilizing Microsoft Intune for deployment, and important information before implementation.  Why BitLocker Matters BitLocker is a built-in encryption feature in Microsoft Windows, designed to strengthen data security by encrypting disk volumes on devices like laptops and desktops. This encryption serves as a safeguard, ensuring that even in cases of device loss or theft, the data remains protected and … Read more

Primary Constructors (C# 12 Syntactic Sugar): A Guide 

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Primary Constructors

With the introduction of .Net8 and C#12 in November of 2023, there were many significant changes to .NET and C#. One such feature in C#12 is the concept of a Primary Constructor. A Primary constructor replaces a class constructor with parameters on the class. The parameters for the constructor are available anywhere in the body of the class.   With Primary Constructor:  It is important to note that the class parameters are not fields of the class. The following code will not compile if used in SimpleClass, as foo and bar are not available on “this”.  Using a Primary Constructor can significantly improve the readability of your code, as it does away with a lot … Read more

5 Software Development Trends for 2024 

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Software Development Trends

In the last few years, we have witnessed unprecedented changes and advancements in technology, which have impacted the world of software development. These changes have presented organizations with additional opportunities and have allowed them to achieve new successes. The ever-changing world of technology can be difficult to keep up with. Trends change quickly and new products and solutions are consistently introduced. We have compiled 5 software development trends to help you understand what to keep an eye on in 2024.   Artificial Intelligence Explosion  Artificial intelligence is opening doors for software development both in enabling efficient work experience for developers through tools like CoPilot, and by augmenting the applications themselves. AI … Read more

Microsoft Fabric: OneLake Provides a Unified Data Lake  

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Microsoft Fabric

Have you been hearing the buzz about Microsoft Fabric?   The Data Engineering and Business Intelligence team at Imaginet has been watching with interest the development of Fabric since it was announced in March 2023. As data professionals with deep expertise in the Microsoft stack of data analytics products, we’ve already been using many of the pieces of Fabric and we’re excited to see how they are evolving.  Microsoft Fabric brings together several data products into a more unified experience, including Azure Synapse for querying data sources, Azure Data Factory for performing ETL processes (Extract, Transform, Load), and Power BI for showing data in dashboard or paginated forms. These products have … Read more