A changelog is a useful addition to any project, as it provides users and contributors with a summary of notable changes between each release. One way to ensure you always update your changelog as part of any new release is by making it part of the the automated deployment process. This blog post describes how I’ve implemented changelog driven deployments for the PowerShell modules I maintain in GitHub.
I have recently added tasks in to our Azure DevOps ARM template deployment pipeline to run the new -WhatIf parameter on the New-AzResourceGroupDeployment to preview the changes an ARM deployment will make, per this guide:
Last week I spent a day troubleshooting an ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template deployment error that was frustratingly vague. A Load Balancer resource in the template was returning a result of “conflict” and the following error:
I have previously blogged about how you can use Influx, Grafana and PowerShell to build and populate metrics dashboards for visualising data from multiple sources. This blog post details how you can use Terraform to quickly and easily deploy Grafana and Influx on a Windows instance in AWS as a proof of concept implementation of these tools.
This blog post details a PowerShell Core compatible cmdlet that I have authored named Copy-FileHash that you can use to copy modified files from one path tree to another. The cmdlet determines which files have different contents by calculating their hash values through the Get-FileHash cmdlet. This might be useful if you need to copy just files that have been modified between two paths and aren’t able to rely on the modified date of those files to determine which have changed.
This blog post describes how you can add a code coverage badge to the readme.md of your PowerShell projects in Github as well as have them automatically updated with the current coverage percentage via your Continuous Integration pipeline (if you’ve implemented one).
I recently needed to make a change to the membership of an Active Directory group which was enforced via Puppet. While waiting for the Puppet manifest to apply I used Get-ADGroupMember in PowerShell to check if the change had taken effect. Finding that it had not, I then wrote a crude loop to continually check the group membership until it changed. It occurred to me that this kind of functionality might be useful as a cmdlet and as such I have created Watch-Command. This blog post details how it works as well as some inventive but controversial design decisions I made.
PowerShell Core is the cross-platform version of PowerShell that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. If you are not familar with it, check out my previous blog post on the topic. It’s likely that PowerShell Core will see more regular releases than we’ve had historically with Windows PowerShell. While you will be able to download the .msi installer for these releases to update your version, this blog post covers how can use the Windows package management tool Chocolatey to manage your upgrades instead.
