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 […]
If you have had a Team Foundation Server (TFS) instance running for any significant length of time you undoubtedly have old shelvesets lying around from other developers (surely you wouldn’t have done this) that have long ago expired and although moldy, they have not disintegrated. Consider cleaning them up using the following short PowerShell script […]
