Mark Wragg

Windows DevOps Engineer and PowerShell fanatic. IT Contractor. Director @ MPFE Consultancy Ltd.

Recent Posts

Installing Windows Server 2016 TP5 (Technical Preview 5)

3 minute read

On the 27th of April 2016 Microsoft released Technical Preview 5 of Windows Server 2016. I was keen to see the new version in action, particularly since attending a talk recently on Windows Containers, which have been a feature available for testing since TP3. I am going to explore Containers in a later post, but here i’m going to cover how I chose to get the OS up and running, as when I came to do it I struggled to find a recommendation on where to test it. 1. Choose a Hypervisor

A PowerShell stopwatch for your Profile.ps1

2 minute read

Boe Prox blogged/tweeted recently about how you can start a stopwatch in PowerShell with one line using the command [System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch]::StartNew(). While there are plenty of other ways to measure time in PowerShell (e.g measure-object, new-timespan), I could see an adhoc stopwatch being useful on occasion. However the raw class name is a bit clunky and forgettable. Therefore as a bit of fun I have created it as a series of functions in my PowerShell Profile.ps1 with friendly names I could call when needed.

Three things you might not know about Import-module

1 minute read

In Powershell the Import-Module cmdlet allows you to extend the cmdlets available to you within your script or console. This can be official extensions, such as the activedirectory module that is included with AD Tools, or custom modules you have written yourself to group together a useful set of functions or commands. This post briefly covers a few tricks i’ve discovered about import-module that i’ve found repeatedly useful.