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 →

Faster: ConfigMgr Collection Manipulation Speed Test

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Recently at work, we had a task come up which saw us needing to move tens of thousands of devices between collections in CM. We decided to run some tests to find the fastest way! We compared:

  • The SCCM 1511 Era Collection Cmdlets
  • The newly released speedier Collection Cmdlets which shipped with Tech Preview 1803
  • Using Keith Garner’s super powerful CMPSLib Module
  • Query Based Membership
  • AD Group Query Membership
  • Direct SQL Membership Tampering ☠

I’d always kind of wondered myself, so it was a fun challenge to come up with some hard numbers.  And for the last item in the list…this is just for fun, I do not recommend using this in your production…or your testlab.  Or anywhere.

The test lab

All testing occurred in my VM Testlab, a Ryzen 7 1700 with 64 GB of RAM, with storage served on NVMe m.2 SSD drives.   A beastly machine (also hello to viewers from the year 2025 where we have 6TBs of storage on our phones and this is laughably quaint.  Here in 2018, we believed more RBG = more better, and we were happy, damn it!) Continue reading →

ClientFaux – the fastest way to fill ConfigMgr with Clients

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Recently at work, we were debating the best way to handle mass collection moves in ConfigMgr.  We’re talking moving 10,000 or more SCCM devices a day into Configuration Manager collections.

To find out, I installed CM in my beastly Altaro VM Testlab (the build of which we covered here), and then wondered…

how the heck will I get enough clients in CM to test in the first place?

Methods we could use to populate CM with Clients

At first I thought of using SCCM PXE OSD Task Sequences to build dozens of VMs, which my lab could definitely handle.  But a PXE Image was taking ~24 minutes to complete, which ruled that out.  Time to thousand clients even running four images at a time would be over one hundred hours, no go.

Then I thought about using differencing disks coupled with AutoUnattend images created using WICD, like we covered here on  (Hands-off deployments), but that still takes ~9 minutes per device, which is a lot of time and will use up my VM resources.  Time to thousand clients, assuming four at a time? 36 hours.

I thought I remembered seeing someone come up with a tool to create fake ConfigMgr clients, so I started searching…and it turns out that other than some C# code samples,  I had a fever dream basically, it didn’t exist.

So I decided to make it, because after all, which is more fun to see when you open the console in your testlab, this?

Or this?

And it only took me ~40 hours of dev time and troubleshooting.  But my time per client?  Roughly eight seconds!  That means 450 clients PER hour, or a time to thousand clients of only two hours!  Now we’re cooking…

Continue reading →