PowerShell Simplification Learn to configure computers using PowerShell but with better syntax, less effort, and fewer errors using DSC. When configuring remote systems using PowerShell, it often can involve lots of hands-on time settings up environments, spinning up cloud instances, and running various scripts. This is not the only option! You can automate PowerShell processes. […]
External code audit? Need a list of TFS file changes during a specific time frame? Consider using a PowerShell script. While history in TFS can provide a list, it does it by change set, not by file. To see it by file, only one file can be seen at a time. PowerShell script can get […]
Trouble Shooting Errors Recently, I was trying to display the errors and warning from a DotNet Build. While the warnings all displayed correctly, the errors always included the stack trace: I was able to control the error output slightly by varying the global $ErrorView variable, but the only two options were NormalView or CategoryView, neither of […]
Installation I was tasked with installing custom and generic software on a dozen new servers. As an SDET, I have never done this type of task before, so I googled some methods for automating this process since manually installing each server was time-consuming. PowerShell seemed to be the logical tool for running through my list of tasks. I was […]
Efficiency Branches, anyone? I am currently working on a large integration project that uses a PowerShell script within each sub-module to manage building, deploying and even launching Visual Studio. Due to a reliance on code namespaces matching with folder structures, these PowerShell scripts are sprinkled all over a large directory structure. Fortunately, they are well-named […]
Improvements of PowerShell PSGallery Untrusted As a result, Find-Module works without issue. However, Install-Module will prompt you with an untrusted repository warning. To avoid this, assuming you do indeed trust the repository, you can set it to trusted with the command: Set-PSRepository -Name PSGallery -InstallationPolicy Trusted Apt-Get for Windows with PowerShell Package Management Those of […]
How-to Access VSTS OData Given that Microsoft has abandoned their TFS CmdLets, one alternative is to access VSTS data is through the OData interface using the Invoke-RestMethod. Before you begin you need to setup Alternate authentication credentials by navigating to https://.visualstudio.com/_details/security/altcreds. Once these are established, you will likely want to save them to a local PowerShell […]
A Simplified Way to Deploy New Releases At IntelliTect, a common pattern of our client solutions are windows services that process work on either a scheduled basis or watch a file location. We often use a combination of the Topshelf framework with the TopShelf.Quartz job scheduling package to solve these problems. These packages expose a […]
MSCORELIB Classes that Work With Using Static in C# 6.0 While writing another MSDN magazine article on C# 6.0 (the third because the language continues to improve) I was looking for a good example of when to use the new “using static” feature. Towards this effort, I used PowerShell to crawl through all the MSCORELIB […]
How-to Clean Up Your %PATH% As developers, we frequently end up with duplicate entries in our path. From the command line you can clean up your path using pathman.exe. Here’s a PowerShell Script to find the duplicates and remove them using Pathman.exe: $extraPath=(($env:path.Split(';') | group | ?{$_.Count -gt 1}).Values | %{$_[0]} pathman.exe /ru $extrapath Disclaimer: […]
