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Recently at work I have finally seen the light and begun adding Pester tests to my modules.  Why is this a recent thing, you may ask?  After all, I was at PowerShell Summit and heard the good word about it from Dave Wyatt himself way back in 2015, I’ve had years to start doing this.

Honestly, I didn’t get it…

To tell the truth, I didn’t understand the purpose of Pester. I always thought ‘Why do I need to test my code? I know it works if it accomplishes the job it’s supposed to do’.

For instance, I understood that Pester was a part of test-driven development, a paradigm in which you start by writing tests before you write any code.  You’d write a ‘It should make a box’ test and wire it up before you actually wrote the New-Box function.  But I was only looking at the outside of my code, or where it integrates into the environment.  In truth, all of the tests I wrote earlier on were actually integration tests.

See, Pester is a Unit Driven Test Framework.  It’s meant to test the internal logic of your code, so that you can develop with certainty that new features to your function don’t break your cmdlet.

CodeCoverage made Pester finally click

It wasn’t until I learned about the powerful -CodeCoverage parameter of Pester that it actually clipped.  For instance, here’s a small piece of pseudo code, which would more or less add a user to a group in AD. Continue reading →

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  Guess and checking my way through with their ancient and outdated Python API docs my sole and dubious reference material, and with a Fiddler window MITM-ing my own requests in the search to figure out how things actually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 →