As a Consultant

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...

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....

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 GitH...