Every day some one tends to ask me if there is a simpler way to do task A or B, and the minute I mention PowerShell the response is almost always the same, “yea i have been meaning to learn that but. This really saddens me for 2 reasons, Because PowerShell can and does make your life simpler i …
Part of building a functional test lab is being able to deal with cattle and not pets. With that in mode I’m writing a series about the script necessary to build a production like lab for testing DSC, and be able to to tear it down and rebuild it with little effort. Part 1 is about …
Have you ever needed to communicate between scripts, perhaps running on different servers and in different languages? Did you use a non-standard “messaging” solution like the file system or a SQL database? Did you try to avoid this and squeeze everything into a monolithic, delicate …
Ever wonder how PowerShell seems to know how to format objects? When you run Get-ChildItem or Get-WmiObject , you only see a few key properties, but a wealth of other information is available through commands like Select-Object and Get-Member . Have you ever written a PowerShell function that you …
A couple of days ago I posted a blog article titled “PowerShell function: Test-ConsoleColor provides a visual demonstration of the foreach scripting construct” and today I thought I would walk you through that function step by step since it’s what I consider to be a well written …
As you’ve probably read, Microsoft recently announced that they’re getting on board with SSH, and that they’ve plans to, in some future-and-unspecified version of Windows, include a default SSH server and client. Some folks have taken to the Twittersphere rejoicing this decision, …
The PowerShell code you write can turn up in interesting places. Production services might rely on it. Your co-workers might take a peak and borrow ideas from it. You might decide to share it online. Someone might see your code online and use it in their own solutions. Hit the link for a quick bit …
Jason Helmick and I were recently up in Redmond recording a Microsoft Virtual Academy series entitled, “Building Your Datacenter One DSC Resource at a Time.” While we were there, we decided to film a tongue-in-cheek promo for the series that started with the premise that, “if you …
In this entry I combing all I covered into a set of scripts to automate the process of creating a small footprint VHDX base image and a WIM to use a sorce that is fully patched. And I added a script to update the files on a regular basis. Check it out and let me know what you think. Creating a small …
Configuration IDs - Globally Unique Identifiers, or GUIDs, that DSC nodes use to identify themselves to a pull server - have always been a limiting factor in DSC design and architecture. In the April 2015 preview of WMF5, however, Microsoft has completely overhauled Configuration IDs. If …
