A motion-activated spider for Halloween with an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi

Every year my family hangs a large decorative spider over our doorway for Halloween. This year I decided to make it flash red LED eyes and play a random assortment of spooky sounds (including, but not limited to, bats, chains and the Vincent Price laugh from "Thriller") when »

Building a custom Dynamics 365 data interface with OpenFaaS

Over the past several months, I've been doing a lot of work with OpenFaaS in my spare time, and in today's post I will show how you can use it to easily build and deploy a custom web service interface for data in a Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement online tenant. »

Installing and securing OpenFaaS on an AKS cluster

A few months back, I wrote a guide for installing and locking down OpenFaaS in a Docker Swarm running on Google Cloud Platform virtual machines. Today I want to share a step-by-step guide that shows how to install OpenFaaS on a new Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster using an Nginx »

Using Dynamics 365 virtual entities to show data from an external organization

I was recently asked to be a guest on the third-anniversary episode of the CRM Audio podcast. While I was there George Doubinski challenged me to create a plugin in one Dynamics 365 organization to retrieve records from another Dynamics 365 organization so they could be displayed as virtual entities. »

An Azure AD OAuth 2 helper microservice

One of the biggest trends in systems architecture these days is the use of "serverless" functions like Azure Functions, Amazon Lambda and OpenFaas. Because these functions are stateless, if you want to use a purely serverless approach to work with resources secured using Azure Active Directory like Dynamics »