Learn to configure computers using PowerShell but with better syntax, less effort, and fewer errors. 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. IntelliTect senior software engineer, […]
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 changeset, not by file. To see it by file, only one file can be seen at a time. PowerShell script can get the […]
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 which gave me […]
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 able […]
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 and exist in […]
In a departure from my recent focus on .NET Core, in this month’s Essential .NET Column I’m going to focus on a host of new features that significantly increase the power of Windows PowerShell. To me, the most significant improvements are in the area of cross-platform support—yes, really, PowerShell now runs on Linux. Not only […]
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://<yourtenant>.visualstudio.com/_details/security/altcreds. Once these are established, you will likely want to save them to a local PowerShell variable so that they […]
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 useful fluent interface to schedule multiple jobs […]
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 types and output the ones meeting the following criteria: The […]
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: $extraPath=(($path.Split(“`;”) | group | ?{$_.Count -gt 1}).Values | %{$_[0]} pathman.exe /ru $extrapath Disclaimer: Works for us.
