Latest Azure AD topics

On Wednesday, April 22, I presented the webinar Get Certified! Overview of the MS-600 exam & Microsoft 365 Developer Associate Certification with Rencore & Waldek Mastykarz. Rencore has posted the recording of the webinar as well as a link to the slides if you weren’t able to join us live or you want to re-watch it. Click here to access the recording. In that webinar I hinted there was more coming - I ’m excited to share with you a new webinar series I ’m hosting starting on May 5th!

Microsoft released a new certification in November 2019 for Microsoft 365 developers. The Microsoft 365 Certified: Developer Associate certification measures developers across five (5) primary workloads in Microsoft 365. Developers must pass a single exam, the MS-600: Building Applications & Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services, to achieve this certification. Andrew Connell, a Microsoft Office Development MVP, was deeply involved in working with Microsoft as they created the certification, exam, and associated materials.

Late last year, Microsoft introduced a new certification for developers working in the Microsoft 365 space. The Microsoft 365 Certified: Developer Associate is intended to measure & certify someone can “design, build, test, and maintain applications and solutions that are optimized for the productivity and collaboration needs of organizations using the Microsoft 365 platform”. In order to achieve this certification, you must pass a single exam: Exam MS-600: Building Applications and Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services.

In my last post, Securing an Azure Function App with Azure AD - Works with SharePoint Framework!, I showed how you can secure a REST API deployed as an Azure Function App using Azure Active Directory (AzureAD). This comes in quite handy when you want to secure some custom server-side business logic that'’s called from a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) client-side solution. The SPFx docs show how to use APIs with permissions to the Microsoft Graph. This post will explain how to add custom permissions to the AzureAD application that is used to secure your Azure Function.

If you create an application or API that is secured with Azure AD, you are likely going to require a consumer of your application to provide an OAuth access token in order to access your application or API. The caller would have to obtain this token from Azure AD by first authenticating with Azure AD and then request a token for your application. For the rest of this post, I’m going to assume you are working with a REST API, but everything applies to an application as well.

I recently published a new chapter in my Mastering the SharePoint Framework on-demand course for developers that included a section that showed how to call a REST API deployed using an Azure Function App and secured with Azure AD from the SharePoint Framework. When I was working on this chapter, it felt like the process of configuring an Azure Function App to be secured with Azure AD was harder and more complex than it should have been. Specifically, some of the things you do aren’t explained as well… so I decided to blog about it here!

I recommend people avoid this option for granting their SPO tenant permissions to endpoints and services secured with Azure AD.

I’m excited to share this latest update to my course, Mastering the SharePoint Framework for developers. Today’s update, packaged as sprint 13, includes two new chapters and a few updates… and it’s a huge release… the biggest yet adding over 3 hours of new content! Sprint 13 also marks a milestone: the Fundamentals Bundle of the course is now content complete! This means all planned chapters are now published. I will continue to make edits to existing chapters updating content when circumstances warrant, but at this time no new chapters or lessons are planned.