PowerShell Script to Find Connectors from PowerApps Apps

Brian T. Jackett PowerApps, PowerShell

In this post I’ll share a script I developed for a customer to find which connectors are used by which PowerApps apps.  Currently this is not something available through the Power Platform Admin Center.  Feel free to use this script as you see fit.  This script is provided as-is without any warranties of any kind.  If you update or adapt it and decide to re-post please provide attribution.

Script

Note: If you do not see the below Gist please refer to code at this location: PS-Get_PowerApps_App_Connections.ps1


Add-PowerAppsAccount
$environments = Get-PowerAppEnvironment
foreach($environ in $environments.EnvironmentName)
{
$apps = Get-AdminPowerApp -EnvironmentName $environ
$apps | Add-Member -MemberType ScriptProperty -Name Connections -Value {$this.internal.properties.connectionReferences.PSObject.Properties.Value.DisplayName} -Force
$apps | Select-Object AppName, DisplayName, Connections
}

view raw

PS-Get_PowerApps_App_Connections.ps1

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Sample output

image.png

You may notice that the output contains a complex property for the Connections.  It has been some time since I worked with formatting output in PowerShell.  If you have an improvement to the formatting please share back suggestion and I’ll update the sample script.

-Frog Out

Looking Ahead To 2019

Brian T. Jackett Personal

In this post I’ll look ahead at what I have coming up in 2019 and what I look to accomplish.

Background

In previous years I have typically blogged at the start and end of the year about my goals and retrospective.  In mid-2018 I started capturing a monthly retrospective (see How I Do A Personal Monthly Retrospective).  While I’m doing these personal retrospectives more frequently (monthly vs. yearly) they usually contain more personal things than I would feel comfortable sharing publicly.

Ahead in 2019

Baby number 3

The biggest thing I’m looking forward to in 2019 is that my wife Sarah and I are expecting our third child later this year.  We’re finally starting to share the news outside of our immediate family.  I’m very excited and happy that our family is growing and I look forward to sharing our love with our new baby.

Exercise

For the past several years I’ve been running a few 5k races, quarter marathon races, and obstacle course / mud runs.  This has been a good way to push myself to stay active and healthy.  This year I’ve already signed up for a 5k and an obstacle course race in the first half of the year.  I’ve already started training for both and it’s amazing how much better I feel physically and mentally after getting into a good workout routine.  I find that I have more energy and motivation to accomplish things and hope that I can keep this up in the coming months.

Faith life

My Catholic faith has always been a big part of my life, but this year especially is an important year as my wife is preparing to enter fully into the Catholic Church.  I’m proud to support her on her faith journey as well as continuing to raise our children in our shared faith.

Technical leadership

In 2018 I went through a program at Microsoft called Technical Leadership Development Program (TLDP).  The purpose of this program is to identify individual contributors (ICs, not a manager of people) and grow their technical leadership skills to make a bigger impact inside and outside the company.  While there were many takeaways from this program one of the big ones for me was the following progression of stages (starting at bottom and going up) for a technical leader:

Technical Leaders…

    • Stage 4 – Drive Impact Through Strategy
    • Stage 3 – Drive Impact Through Others
    • Stage 2 – Master Individual Impact
    • Stage 1 – Grow Individual Impact

  image

At the start of 2018 I would estimate that I was in the 2nd stage of mastering individual impact and not realizing (at the time) that the next stage was to move onto driving impact through others.  Note that this progression to stage 3 doesn’t require moving into people management.  Instead you can remain an individual contributor while still increasing impact through other people.  I tested the waters with this process through the 30 Days of Microsoft Graph blog series and a few other side projects.  I’m looking forward to continue this progression in 2019.

Reading books

Each year on average I read 2-4 books, usually during slow weeks around holidays when I can devote more attention.  In the past year I’ve found a number of great books in a number of topics including science fiction, religion, and technical leadership.  I should probably join a Good Reads program but have not done so yet.  Instead I usually end up hearing about a good book recommendation from a friend or coworker and then picking it up from the local library, borrowing from a friend, or similar.  I’m not always able to reserve time each day / week, but I do find that I sleep better when I read for at least 10+ minutes before going to bed.

Conclusion

These are the things I’m currently looking forward to in 2019.  Thanks to my mentor Sean McDonough for urging me to get this written.  I know much will change throughout this year, especially once baby #3 arrives.  Here’s to a successful start to the year and continued growth.  If you have your own goals or plans for the year please share in the comments.

-Frog Out

Introduction to Calling Microsoft Graph from a C# .Net Core Application

Brian T. Jackett General .Net, Microsoft Graph

This post is a part of The Second Annual C# Advent.

Microsoft Graph is the unified API for any developers working with data inside Office 365, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Windows 10, and more.  In this post we’ll cover a quick introduction and share resources from 30 Days of Microsoft Graph blog series to show how to authenticate and to make calls against Microsoft Graph with C# and .Net Core (v2.1 as of the time of writing.)  Each of the referenced articles aims to take 5-15 mins to get you up to speed as quickly as possible while also providing hands-on exercises.  If you’d like to skip the background reading and start from scratch building a .Net Core console application that calls Microsoft Graph read through the README for the base-console-app within dotnetcore-console-sample.

<Update 2019-10-07>Thanks to reader John Guilbert for pointing out that the sample code using MSAL .Net 2.x has deprecated certain APIs.  I’ve updated the sample code to reflect MSAL .Net 4.x.</Update>

Microsoft Graph overview

Microsoft Graph offers developers (and IT pros / admins) the ability to access data and insights in a number of services within Microsoft 365 services.  This includes:

  • Azure AD
  • Office 365 services
    • SharePoint
    • OneDrive
    • Outlook/Exchange
    • Microsoft Teams
    • OneNote
    • Planner
    • Excel
  • Enterprise Mobility and Security services
    • Identity Manager
    • Intune
    • Advanced Threat Analytics
    • Advanced Threat Protection
  • Windows 10 services
    • Activities
    • Devices
  • Education

By providing a unified endpoint for accessing all of these services Microsoft Graph removes a number of barriers including:

  • Discovering the service-specific endpoint URL
  • Authenticating to each endpoint separately
  • Managing different permission models
  • Working with incompatible data formats
  • …and more

All requests made to Microsoft Graph are sent as REST calls to https://graph.microsoft.com and leverage a common authentication model based on Azure AD and OAuth permissions along with a consent framework for users or admins.  The quickest way to see Microsoft Graph requests in action is to navigate to the Microsoft Graph explorer (https://aka.ms/ge, ge = Graph Explorer.)  For more information on using Graph Explorer please read Day 3 – Graph Explorer from the 30 Days of Microsoft Graph series.  Additionally you can make requests against Microsoft Graph using API development tools such as Postman.  Please read Day 13 – Postman to make Microsoft Graph requests for more information on using PostMan with Microsoft Graph.

 

Getting started sample

Seeing requests and their responses in a browser or tool is useful, but making requests in code or scripts is the more common scenario for usage.  In the examples below we will cover C# and .Net Core as .Net Core is available cross-platform, can be built in Visual Studio Code (also cross-platform), and offers many hosting options (console app, web app, serverless functions, and more.)

Authentication

All requests to Microsoft Graph require an authenticated context, either delegated or app-only.  Delegated is a union of the logged-in user’s context along with the application’s context.  App-only (as the name implies) is only the application’s context without any user involvement.  Please read Day 8 – Authentication roadmap and access tokens and Day 9 – Azure AD applications  on V2 endpoint for more information about creating an Azure AD application and getting an authenticated context.  On a similar note, you are highly encouraged to leverage Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL) for creating your authentication context as this is the forward-focused version as opposed to the older Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL).

Microsoft Graph SDK

While it is entirely possible to call the Microsoft Graph with an HttpClient (or similar) object, the Azure AD Identity and Microsoft Graph product groups recommend leveraging the Microsoft Graph SDK (Microsoft.Graph on Nuget.)  This SDK provides a number of benefits including:

  • Strongly typed entities and Microsoft Graph responses
  • Fluent API syntax
  • …and more

In future releases Microsoft Graph SDK will also provide abstractions for authentication prerequisites, automatic handling of retry logic or error handling, and more.

Sample solution

As mentioned at the beginning of this post if you’d like to build a working application from scratch (or clone the repo and configure the necessary settings) you can find the base-console-app within dotnetcore-console-sample.  Extracting the bare essential lines of code from this sample results in the following for authenticating to Microsoft Graph.

Note: If you do not see the below Gist please refer to code at this location: CS-Graph_Prepare_GraphServiceClient.cs


var clientId = "<AzureADAppClientId>";
var clientSecret = "<AzureADAppClientSecret>";
var redirectUri = "<AzureADAppRedirectUri>";
var authority = "https://login.microsoftonline.com/<AzureADAppTenantId>/v2.0&quot;;
var cca = ConfidentialClientApplicationBuilder.Create(clientId)
.WithAuthority(authority)
.WithRedirectUri(redirectUri)
.WithClientSecret(clientSecret)
.Build();
// use the default permissions assigned from within the Azure AD app registration portal
List<string> scopes = new List<string>();
scopes.Add("https://graph.microsoft.com/.default&quot;);
var authenticationProvider = new MsalAuthenticationProvider(cca, scopes.ToArray());
GraphServiceClient graphClient = new GraphServiceClient(authenticationProvider);

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CS-Graph_Prepare_GraphServiceClient.cs

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The following class implements the IAuthenticationProvider interface used for retrieving and then adding an Azure AD access token to subsequent requests to Microsoft Graph.  An out of the box implementation of this class will be provided at a later date within the Graph SDK.

Note: If you do not see the below Gist please refer to code at this location: CS-Graph_Class_MsalAuthenticationProvider.cs


public class MsalAuthenticationProvider : IAuthenticationProvider
{
private IConfidentialClientApplication _clientApplication;
private string[] _scopes;
public MsalAuthenticationProvider(IConfidentialClientApplication clientApplication, string[] scopes) {
_clientApplication = clientApplication;
_scopes = scopes;
}
public async Task AuthenticateRequestAsync(HttpRequestMessage request)
{
var token = await GetTokenAsync();
request.Headers.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("bearer", token);
}
public async Task<string> GetTokenAsync()
{
AuthenticationResult authResult = null;
authResult = await _clientApplication.AcquireTokenForClient(_scopes).ExecuteAsync();
return authResult.AccessToken;
}
}

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CS-Graph_Class_MsalAuthenticationProvider.cs

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Finally make a sample request to get a list of users within the Azure AD domain by calling Microsoft Graph.

Note: If you do not see the below Gist please refer to code at this location: CS-Graph_Request_Users_GraphServiceClient.cs


var graphResult = graphClient.Users.Request().GetAsync().Result;
Console.WriteLine(graphResult[0].DisplayName);

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CS-Graph_Request_Users_GraphServiceClient.cs

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Conclusion

In this blog post we covered a quick introduction of Microsoft Graph and linked to additional resource within the 30 Days of Microsoft Graph blog series for additional background reading.  We also covered a barebones implementation of calling Microsoft Graph in a C# .Net Core console application.  Full instructions can be found on the base-console-app within dotnetcore-console-sample.  Thank you for reading along and please open an issue on GitHub repo if you run into any issues with the sample project.  Enjoy the rest of The Second Annual C# Advent.

 

-Frog Out

30 Days of Microsoft Graph Blog Series

Brian T. Jackett Microsoft Graph

Last week myself and a virtual team of Microsoft and community contributors started a month long blog series called 30 Days of Microsoft Graph on the Microsoft Graph blog.  You can read more about it on the announcement post which is being updated daily with links to each of the posts throughout November.  Please see the below options for following along:

If you have any feedback or suggestions on the blog series please reach out to me or the rest of the team.  We look forward to hearing from you.

 

-Frog Out