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The PowerShell Conference Book

“Imagine attending a PowerShell conference where over thirty speakers who are subject matter experts in the industry are each presenting one forty-five minute session. All of the sessions are at different times so there's no need to worry about choosing between them. You might be wondering how much a conference like this will cost by the time you pay for the conference, hotel, airfare, and meals? Well, there's no need to worry because this conference doesn't cost a fortune because it's actually a book that's designed to be like a conference.” - From “The PowerShell Conference book” There is a new book in town and it is not a regular book. It is designed to be like a PowerShell conference where the topics are divided into sections ranging from “PowerShell Scripting” to “CloudOps/DevOps”. Each chapter in the book is written by industry experts, hence every chapter is unique and independent. I am very humble and proud of being able to announce that I have wri

Developing PowerShell modules for REST APIs – Part2

This is part 2 of the REST API blogpost. In part1 we successfully setup two REST API endpoints using the UniversalDashboard PowerShell module. In this part we are going to create a simple module that support some CRUD operation against our API. As we are trying to keep things as simple as possible, we will not use any fancy framework (like Plaster) to build our module. We are also going to skip a very important step you should familiarize yourself with, Pester tests. Lets get to it. The module We will build a module called FilesAPI. The module folder will look like this: In the functions folder I have already added the 2 helper functions from part 1, Get-AuthorizationHeader and ConvertTo-Base64 . The other folders are just placeholders for important stuff like classes, private functions that you do not want to make available for the module consumer and tests for Pester tests. For such a small module that we are going to create, one could argue that it is much easier to just

Developing PowerShell modules for REST APIs – Part1

Over the years I have developed different PowerShell modules for different web APIs. I thought it would be a good idea to write a 2 series post about how you could go about to do this. This will be a 2 part blog series where we will run through the entire process of building a module for a REST API. I will try my best to keep this as simple as possible and leave more advanced stuff for a follow up post if the interest is there. What you need Depending on your experience with source control and PowerShell in general, you might want to use GIT or some other software repro for the code. In addition we are going to create a test REST API using the splendid UniversalDashboard PowerShell module created by Adam Driscoll. It is available on the PowershellGallery. Other prerequisites are built-in to Powershell. I will assume that you will be following along using at least PowerShell version 5 or greater. What is HTTP metods for REST API. The primary or most common HTTP verbs used are P

Serialize data with PowerShell

Currently I am working on a big new module. In this module, I need to persist data to disk and reprocess them at some point even if the module/PowerShell session was closed. I needed to serialize objects and save them to disk. It needed to be very efficient to be able to support a high volume of objects. Hence I decided to turn this serializer into a module called HashData. Other Serializing methods In PowerShell we have several possibilities to serialize objects. There are two cmdlets you can use which are built in: Export-CliXml ConvertTo-JSON Both are excellent options if you do not care about the size of the file. In my case I needed something lean and mean in terms of the size on disk for the serialized object. Lets do some tests to compare the different types: (Hashdata.Object.ps1) You might be curious why I do not use the Export-CliXML cmdlet and just use the [System.Management.Automation.PSSerializer]::Serialize static method. The static method will generate t

Create notification in Windows 10

From time to time I find myself needing a notification tool. Normally a simple show messagebox will suffice, however the trouble with that is that is blocking until someone clicks that OK button. I have seen workarounds that uses wscript and other things, however that is just meh. There is a function in my general purpose repro on BitBucket that is called Show-Message . Here is the function: The “good” thing about this is that it also works on Windows Server 2016 with the GUI experience, however who is using a GUI on a server nowadays? Everybody should be using Nano or Server Core, right? In addition the function will fallback to a regular good old MessageBox if the Windows.UI.Notification namespace is not available. Please note that in those scenarios, the function will block execution until the OK button is clicked. Here is how a notification looks like: You can also control for how long the notification should be shown to the user with the DisplayDuration parameter.

Something completely different – PoshARM

I needed a project for my Xmas holiday and I needed something remotely work related. Thus the dubious PoshARM PowerShell module was born and brought to life during my Xmas holiday. Simply put it is a module that lets you build – for now – simple Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates with PowerShell . The module can also import templates from a file or from the clipboard/string. Your partial template or ready made template can be exported as a PowerShell script. This blog post will walk you through how to use it and the features that is currently implemented. Update 08.02.2017: The module is now published to the PowerShellGallery ( https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/posharm ). It is still in beta version, however test coverage have increased and some bugs have been squashed during the testing. Also help is present, however somewhat lacking here and there. Update 18.01.2017: The module is now on GitHub. Here is the link to the repro ( PoshARM on GitHub ) What