ClientFaux 2.0 – Completely re-written, faster than ever

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As mentioned on the stage at MMSMOA, ClientFaux 2.o is now available.  Completely re-written with as a WPF GUI with automated certificate generation, multi-threading, and all the bells and whistles.

Oh, and Hardware inventory now works!

Download it and give it a try now!  To use, install it on a desktop/laptop/VM which is on a network segment which can reach your CM server.

http://bit.ly/ClientFaux

Launch ClientFaux and click to the Configure CM tab and provide your CM Server FQDN and three letter Site code.

Then click to the Device Naming page and provide your desired naming pattern and starting and ending numbers.

You can also increase the number of threads (I’ve tested up to 12 threads and seven is a good happy medium for resource usage, but feel free to go crazy).

Then to see it in action…click to the ‘Ready’ page and hit ‘Ready!’ and away we go!

 

The Big Warning

This is designed for DEMO or TestLab CM instances.  I do not recommend running it against your Production CM instance as it can create thousands and thousands of CM clients if left running for a few hours!  This can be hard to filter out of data for reporting, dashboards and the like.

Quickie: ConvertTo-PSCustomObject

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Do you ever need to quickly hop between PowerShell tabs in VScode, or have data you want to move from one session to another?

Sure, you could output your data into a .CSV file, a .JSon file, or one of hundreds of other options.  But sometimes it’s nice to just paste right into a new window and get up and running again.  For that, I wrote this small little cmdlet.

 Function ConvertTo-PSCustomObject{
    Param($InputObject)
    $out = "[PSCustomObject]@{`n"
    $Properties = $InputObject | Get-Member | Where MemberType -eq Property
    ForEach ($prop in $Properties){
        $name = $prop.Name
        if ([String]::IsNullOrEmpty($InputObject.$name)){
            $value = $null
        }
        else {
            $value = $InputObject.$name
        }

        $out += "`t$name = '$value'`n"
    }

    $out += "}"
    $out
}

And the usage of it:

ConvertTo-PSCustomObject

Life after Write-Debug

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Hey y’all.  I’ve been getting verrrry deep into the world of Asp.net Model View Controller and working on some big updates to ClientFaux, but I saw this tweet and it spoke to me:

Why?  Because until recently, I was notorious for leaving Write-Debug statements everywhere.  I mean, just take a look at my local git folder.

A PowerShell console window running the following command. Dir c:\git -recurse | select-string 'write-debug' | measure This shows that there are over 150 uses of this command in my PowerShell modules. Uh, probably too many!
I *wasn’t* expecting it to be *this* bad. I’m so, so sorry.

My code was just littered with these after practically every logical operation…just in case I needed to pause my code here at some point in the future.  Actually, someone could look at my code in the past and every Verbose or Debug cmd was basically a place that I got stuck while writing that cmdlet or script.  I mean, using the tools is not wrong, but it always felt like there should be better ways to do it.

Recently, I have learned of a much better way and I want to share it with everybody.

Why not use Write-Debug?

Write-Debug is wrong and if you use it you should feel bad

I’m just kidding!  You know, to be honest, something really gets under my skin about those super preachy posts like you always find on medium that say things like ‘You’re using strings wrong’, or “You’re all morons for not using WINS” or something snarky like that.

It’s like, I might have agreed with them or found the info useful, but the delivery is so irksome that I am forced to wage war against them by means of a passive aggressive campaign of refusing to like their Tweets any more as my retribution.

That being said, here’s why I think we should avoid Write-Debug.  It ain’t wrong, but you might like the alternative better.

Continue reading →

Quickie – Join video files with PowerShell and FFMPEG

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Caption Text says 'Join Video Files quickly, gluing stuff with PowerShell and ffMpeg', overlaid on an arts and craft scene of glues, papers, scissors and various harvest herbs

While I’m working on some longer posts, I thought I’d share a quick snippet I came up with this weekend as I was backing up a number of old DVDs of family movies.

FFMPeg has the awesome ability to join a number of video files together for you, but the syntax can be kind of strange.  Once I learned the syntax, I sought to make sure I never had to do it again, and created this cmdlet.

Usage notes

In this basic version, it will join every file in a directory, giving you Output.mkv.  Be sure your files in the directory are sequentially ordered as well, to control their position.

Ensure that FFMpeg’s binaries are available in your Path variable as well.

Later on, I may add the ability to provide which specific files you want to join, if desired 🙂

Enjoy 🙂

 

Excursion: Model View Controller Programming – Part I

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The header graphic, titled - Excursion Model View Controllers. Subtitle: getting side-tracked in the land of dotnet. Pictures a single adventurer from far away, bundled up against the cold, trekking up the side of a snowy mountain

Well, it’s been a minute, hasn’t it?  This 🦊 needed a break after speaking at MMS and PSChatt! (both awesome events!  If you’re shopping for a big conference, I can’t recommend #MMSMOA enough!  And early bird pricing is open now!).

Since then at work I’ve had to dive deep and learn a whole new skill set.

Fortunately, I had a scuba tank and now that I’m back up for air, I’d love to share a bit of what I learned.

This is kind of different

It’s been a long term goal of mine to expand beyond my PowerShell capabilities and learn as much as I can of this ‘programmer’ stuff. I’d always wanted to learn C#, and my first deliverable was the ‘at least kind of working’ Client Faux (big updates to come).

Our goal was to make a cool website where end users could go and type in manually, or provide a CSV file of devices, and I’d use that to spin up new collections with deployments and then perform some automation on those devices within SCCM.  I want to talk through how I’m doing that, and the goal of this post should lay a foundation to answer the question of: what is a model view controller(mvc)?  Spoilers, MVCs are all around us!

So to recap our goal:  I needed to have a user give me input and a csv, then parse and slice it and show them the results to edit or tweak. That’s going to be our end game for this guide.
But before we talk about the technology…

But Stephen, are you qualified to teach me about this?

Uhhhh…maybe. I may not have all of the terminology down pat, and there might be a more efficient way of doing things than I have figured out.  But, ya know, I did just figure this out, plus I’m willing to share with you, so what else are you gonna do? 😁🦊

The technology stack

The goal was to host the site in IIS, with an ASP.Net Model View Controller and the powerful Entity Framework to handle my DB interactions. To throw some jargon, an ASP.net MVC with EF 6. Continue reading →