This is a non-technical blog post I felt like writing. Main focus will be the change being driven by the tremendous technological advances the last 5-10 years. The inspiration of this writing is mostly derived from a talk by Technical Fellow Jeffery Snower called “Software development in an age of social responsibility” (it is available on youtube) and my ever curious mind. Executive summary If you think the technological changes are moving fast, you are in for a surprise. It will accelerate exponentially as the 4th industrial revolution gains momentum. How will you adapt to the cha ..read more

“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 i ..read more

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 ..read more

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 addi ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

PowerShell is getting increasing attention and gaining followers each day. That is a good thing in my book. I saw a tweet about Citrix OctoBlu automation where Dave Brett (@dbretty) was using it to save money with a PowerShell script (full post here) to power on and off VMs. I reached out to him and asked if he would like a little help with his PowerShell script. To my delight, he happily accepted and this post is about how I transformed his scripts to take advantage of the full power of The Shell. Fair warning is in order, since I have never used or touched a OctoBlu solution. Starting sc ..read more

This years Microsoft Ignite conference was all about transforming your business with technology. Here is a techy summary for business-minds. Going forward, IT-Pros must prepare to answer both tricky business questions, and leverage new tools to meet business demands. I imagine questions like these:   What are the needs of our business? How can we empower our users to apply the cloud to gain competitive advantages? How can we innovate with greater agility and optimize our IT resources? How can we migrate from the traditional model where IT is just a cost-center, to a lean/mean machine w ..read more

I needed to dedicate a full blog post about Windows Server 2016 and the way it will impact you going forward. At some point some of these features will apply to you too, as your infrastructure start to run the new server bits. Here are the highlights from MSignite. > Highlights Installation Development Packaging and deployment Configuration Containers Operation Validation and Pester Testing Operating security > Installation Server 2016 comes in three flavors. You have the “Desktop experience” server intended for management of other flavors of 2016 or as a terminal server. Next is S ..read more