Faster Web Cmdlet Design with Chrome 65

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If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that I LOVE making PowerShell cmdlets, especially ones that consume an API or scrape a web site.

However when it comes to tools that peruse the web, this can get a bit tricky, especially if a site doesn’t publish an API because then you’re stuck parsing HTML or loading and manipulating an invisible Internet Explorer -COMObject barfs in Japanese.  And even this terrible approach is closed to us if the site uses AJAX or dynamically loads content.

In that case, you’re restricted to making changes on a site while watching Fiddler 4 and trying to find interesting looking method calls (this is how I wrote my PowerShell module for Zenoss, by the way.  Guess and checking my way through with their ancient and outdated Python API docs my sole and dubious reference material, and with a Fiddler window MITM-ing my own requests in the search to figure out how things actually worked.  It…uh…took a bit longer than I expected…)

This doesn’t have to be the case anymore!  With the new release of Chrome 65 comes a PowerShell power tool so powerful that it’s like moving from a regular apple peeler to this badboy.

What’s this new hotness?

For a long time now if you load the Chrome Developer Tools by hitting F12, you’ve been able to go to the Network tab and copy a HTTP request as a curl statement. Continue reading →

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Making an Azure Function Reddit Bot

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Around the time I was celebrating my 100th post, I made a big to-do about opening my own subreddit at /r/FoxDeploy. I had great intentions, I would help people in an easier to read format than here in the comments…but then, I just kind of, you know, forgot to check the sub for four months.

But no longer!  I decided to solve this problem with the only tool I know…code.

Azure Functions

A few months ago, I went to ‘The Red Shirt’ tour with Scott Guthrie in which he talked all about  the new Azure Hotness.  He covered Functions, an awesome headless, serverless Platform as a Service offering which can run a variety of languages including C#, F#, Node.js, Java, and of, course, Best Language, PowerShell.

I was so intrigued by this concept when I first learned of it at an AWS event years ago in Chicago, where they introduced Lambda. Lambda was cool, but it couldn’t run bestgirl language, PowerShell. Continue reading →

Backing up your Testlab with Altaro VM Backup

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To be a good engineer, you need a Testlab. End of sentence.

You need it so you can peruse flights of fancy, like making some web services, trying out that new language and other endeavors perhaps not specifically related to your day to day work.

It HAS to be your own too!  You can’t just use the one at your work.  If things go awry between you and your company, you definitely don’t want to lose your livelihood AND your hard-earned testlab in the same stroke!  This is also why you don’t want to have your life insurance purchased through your work too (or if you do, make sure you don’t get fired and die in the same day).

In consulting, I would get assigned to a project and have a month or so to come up to speed on new technologies. I found that when I had a testlab, it was so much quicker to get working, just make a new VM, domain join it and have SQL installed and ready for a new SCCM, Scorch, Air-Watch, whatever. In fact, the periods when I did the best engineering work over my career closely line up to the times that I had a working testlab available to model my customer’s environments and make mistakes on my own time, not theirs.

If you have read this and are convinced that you too need a testlab, and don’t yet have one, you can click here to read my guide here on setting up a Domain Controller with one-click!

The one-click domain controller UI in action

And what should we do with things that are important? We protect them. In this post I’ll walk you through some of the options available to protect and backup your testlab.

Continue reading →

Glorious PowerShell Dashboards

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I’ve covered the topic of dashboards on this blog a few times before, from layering CSS on PowerShell’s built-in HTML capabilities, to hacking together HTML 5 templates with PowerShell, as the hunt continues for the next great thing in PowerShell reporting. Guys, the hunt is OVER!  Time to ascend to the next level in reporting…

It’s the motherlode!  Adam Driscoll’s AWESOME PowerShell Universal Dashboard, a gorgeous and dead-simple dashboard tool which makes it super easy to retrieve values from your environment and spin them into adaptive, animated dashboards full of sexy transitions and colors.   Click here to see it in action. Or just look at these sexy animations and tasteful colors.  Deploy this and then show your boss.  It’s guaranteed to impress, blow his pants off, and get you a huge raise or maybe a $5 Starbucks gift card.

1GIF

In this post, we’ll learn what the PowerShell Universal Dashboard is, how to quickly get setup, and I’ll share my own TOTALLY PIMPED OUT CUSTOM Dashboard with you free, for you to modify to fit your environment, and get that free Pumpkin Spice, son!

What is it?

The PowerShell Universal Dashboard is an absolutely gorgeous module created by the great Adam Driscoll.  It seeks to make it dead-simple to create useful, interactive dashboards anywhere you can run PowerShell.  It’s built using .net Core Kestrel and ChartJS, and you can run it locally for folks to connect to see your dashboard, or deploy right to IIS or even Azure!

If you didn’t earlier, you really should click here to see it in action!!!

Getting Started

To begin, simply launch PowerShell and run the following command.

Install-Module UniversalDashboard

Next, copy the code for Adam’s sample Dashboard from here and run it.  You should see this screen appear

Now, PowerShell Pro Tools IS a paid piece of software.  But the trial license is super generous, so simply put in your e-mail and you’ll receive a license automatically in a few minutes. Continue reading →

Ignite, decompressed

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MSFTignite2017 (1)

Ignite Orlando WAS AWESOME! In this post, I’ll give you some of my fun memories and commentary about the event, and then end with a bunch of the best videos from Microsoft Ignite 2017.

My sessions

We had a HUGE turn out for the PowerShell Community Event, in fact, it was so big that we had an overflow room with 200 people in it!

2017-09-26 15.07.11

There were a lot of folks waiting outside who weren’t able to attend, and at this point Adam Bertram and Simon Whalin were the REAL MVPs.  They left the room and lead an impromptu session to get the discussion going in the overflow room. Continue reading →