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store and manipulate information instead of text. But are you aware that there are 4 ways to create objects in PowerShell

what if I told you, creating a module can be as simple as grouping multiple functions together and renaming the extension to psm1. It sounds a lot less complicated when you put it that way.

sometimes, when there is a lot of code...I think to myself, this would be better in a .NET app, for testability

recall the exact syntax inside the parameter block. Even though I've created hundreds of scripts in my day, I always use a template because its much easier. Today I'm going to share with the exact Powershell template I use when creating my Powershell Scripts.

things out, or for projects that I know will be around for a while. There's a few basic things that I like all my scripts to have, so I've created a simple template that I use when creating new scripts.

vendors and so on. Often telemetry includes PII, personally identifiable information, which of course is a no-go. This post aims to explain how you can responsibly collect telemetry for your PowerShell module to track its usage, version distribution and much more. I will show you the steps you need to take to use Azure ApplicationInsights to collect and Power BI to visualize your telemetry.

brackets match and which do not. For people with color blindness or other optic maladies, the problem can be even worse. By color-coding bracket pairs,

MAML XML for use as console help. MAML is cumbersome to edit by hand, and common tools and editors don't support it for complex scenarios like they do with markdown. Markdown is adopted widely by Open Source, supported by many editors including Visual Studio Code, and with minimal rules, easier to author. PlatyPS is provided as a solution to allow documenting PowerShell help in any editor or tool that supports markdown.

PowerShell functions. I know I've mentioned a few recommended best practices. But since they are important, I want to review and re-emphasize them. These practices will make your code easier to write, debug or troubleshoot and more secure. I'd like to think some of them are simply common sense, but sometimes we need someone to remind us. These items are not in any particular order.

ATA Learning!

how to get the performance of your PowerShell scripts to the highest it can be.

actually start? Especially when you've been writing PowerShell which is often used as automation language, but not actually as programming language?

look at various methods, status codes, headers, query string parameters, cookies, sessions, authentication, sending files, processing JSON, XML and text and finally we look at retries, redirects and timeouts.

members.

and PowerShell. No license required.

as a packaging target with PowerShell Pro Tools for Visual Studio, VS Code, and with Merge-Script. We're even introducing experimental Linux and Mac support. You'll be able to run your scripts cross-platform!

post I will show you how you can create exe files with a small and simple program called ps2exe.

function for this Iron Scripter challenge walk-through.

native PowerShell debugger.

Visual Studio Code to debug your script modules. In this video, we'll build a simple PowerShell script module, and then use the Pester unit testing module to write some failing tests. Then, we'll set a breakpoint in our module and break into the debugger when we execute the Pester unit tests. Once execution is paused, we'll step through the module code line by line, to discover where things are going wrong. We'll then fix the module code, and ensure that our Pester unit tests are passing.

for Visual Studio. You can download PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

this module to test Plaster, Pester, psake, platyPS, Appveyor and ReadTheDocs. I have also been wanting to explore custom classes in Powershell, so I figured Passphraser would be the perfect platform. This allows me to get a passphrase as an object which I can manipulate further to my needs. I wrote a little bit about this in an update to my post on Passphraser, but here I'll dig deeper into the class itself.

around how modules see things.

that enhance usability and versatility of your functions.

understand that it's important for developers to have a fast workflow. That's why we're excited to share with you the support of Dev Drives in Visual Studio!

quite some time, things can, and occasionally do go wrong. Thankfully, there are a number of different diagnostic and troubleshooting tools built into the operating system. In fact, you can diagnose a wide variety of Windows problems through PowerShell by leveraging the built-in troubleshooting packs.

work harmoniously with Python.

scripts. One of those statements is the?if?statement. Today we will take a deep dive into one of the most fundamental commands in PowerShell.

scripts.

session at this year’s PowerShell Summit.

developer. Any keyboard warrior will tell you that knowing the right shortcuts boosts that productivity even further. So, we've put together a short little video that demonstrates some useful shortcuts you can use while coding in Visual Studio.

explore Plaster and how it can help us standardize our PowerShell module development.

in this ATA Learning tutorial.

utilisation when scripts are running on remote/customer servers that need to process millions of lines. Instead of variables I would just write everything off to a file. However, with things like invoking commands in parallel this doesn't work well as there is a need for mutexes where a thread aware collection would work so much better.

the concept of PowerShell scopes isn?t of much concern. But as you begin to build functions, modules and learn to call scripts from other scripts, the topic becomes more important.

You will see that this is not rocket science. Let's jump in.

ensure I understand what I tried, what worked, and what didn't. This is my usual method of solving a problem. Sure, I could commit it to git and then look it up, and I do that, but that doesn't change my behavior where I happen to have lots of "junk" inside of my functions that stay commented out. While this works for me, and I've accepted this as part of my process, I don't believe this should be part of the production code on PowerShellGallery or when the code is deployed.

PowerShell module to the PowerShell Gallery.

parameter sets, you can create a function that has different parameters for multiple scenarios. The user can specify different parameters so the function can take different actions based on the input.

classes, functions and enums.

Windows Services much easier. In this article, we will show you how to use MSI Builder to create an installer for your Windows Services.

gh.exe. You've seen how I approach building a PowerShell and the questions and decisions that come up. Now that I've built a few more Crescendo commands, I realize I can begin copying and pasting. Some of the commands I have in mind, I think, will be very similar. Plus, I have my VSCode Crescendo command snippet.

some of the challenges that he's experienced when automating business processes with PowerShell. Starting in the early days of PowerShell, Adam talks about that first experience where he saw the potential of PowerShell. We also spent some time talking about creating GUI applications in PowerShell. We talk about all this, and much more, in this episode.

writing fast PowerShell code, but until now there was not a good way to measure what is actually happening. This changes with my new Profiler module....

step by step to get you started on writing your own modules.

Robust Coding. A Must-Read for PowerShell Excellence.

we look at InvokeBuild. InvokeBuild provides the ability to create build scripts with PowerShell.

parameter to your PowerShell function is easy. But deciding exactly what you need requires planning and forethought. If you make smart decisions up front, your function will be easier to use and less error-prone.

Begin, Process, and End blocks. These input processing methods enable your functions to process pipeline input and multiple parameter values. In this article, you will learn the basic syntax of PowerShell Begin, Process, and End blocks.

and Unbound ScriptBlocks that I talked about in my previous article also applies to them.

PowerShell performance even if the module is not used in a session.

scripting and toolmaking. The book takes all off our years of experience, not only from writing PowerShell code, to teaching and conference presentations where we hear first hand what people struggle with.

a key value pair from hash table. Enumerating through keys and Key-Value Pairs

Studio Code Extension! This extension provides some features to make it easier to get up and running with Universal and initially aids in authoring dashboards.

validation allows you to limit what is passed to functions. In this article, you're going to learn how to catch problems before they become one with the PowerShell ValidateScript validation attribute.

Example ALC structures to use with in a PowerShell module

that you can use over and over.How to Write Serverless PowerShell Code for AWS LambdaChris Wahl gives you everything you need to know to start moving to a serverless world with AWS Lambda.PowerShell Universal Dashboard – Getting Started with Universal DashboardLee Berg gives a great presentation on getting started with Universal Dashboard. Be sure to follow him on Twitch for more great content and livestreams.

no error message is displayed. In this short article I want to show you how [...]

at?$null?so you know what happens when you unexpectedly run into a?$nullvalue.

task or procedure so you can focus on the result, not the task itself. But what if your script tries to run an action and is unsuccessful, for example, when a user the script attempts to manipulate is invalid or the signed in account has insufficient permissions to run a cmdlet? And do not forget the peculiarities of the online world, such as a network connection dropping or an authentication token expiring.

to use them within in functions and scripts.

with PowerShell scripts and functions. My goal was to build a framework of tools that I could use to automate PowerShell scripting work, such as creating a new module from a group of existing files. I've finally...

in a PowerShell 6 or 7 console for some time, support for new language elements, packaging, etc. was not implemented yet. Now that PowerShell 7 was released, we have added full support for it across the board. I should note here that we do not install PowerShell 7 for you.

your changes. More features are coming.

file(s) into Windows .NET dynamic-link library (DLL) assemblies.

Directory. I just created this script and I am testing it to multiple use cases. This whole project could be a PowerShell module in the future.

generate an EXE file from a PowerShell project, choose the main ps1 and inlude other files and folders.

able to interactively edit text. And I don't just mean text files on your computer. Function definitions and variables1 can be edited in memory. It also supports editing text files over a PS Session, so you can edit text without access to the admin share or installing a editor on the remote computer.

and addressed independently. This allows easy use of multiple APIs within a session.

sign, build, deploy and publish your code with one module. All you need to do is run one command and then write your code. If you're new to PowerShell and not sure how to get going with a module, start here. If you've been writing code for a while and want to do more automation, PSNow is a great fit. It runs on PS Core 6.x and Windows PowerShell running on OSX, Linux and Windows.

and scripts. The Samples folder contains demonstration script files.

PowerShellGallery when creating a GitHub release. Last time it was doing unit testing with pester, now we want our code to get out in the world.

structures and can’t be parsed easily. This the case when you need to extract all the member of an Active Directory group where member can be users and also groups that contains user and groups ?. It’s also the case with data coming from web services and API.

chances are that you're far enough into the PowerShell world that you're using modules that other people authored as well. That's great! There's no need to re-invent any wheels when we can utilize PSGallery, the residence of many great modules.

Microsoft.Diagnostics.Runtime library. You can open memory dumps and attached to processes, dump thread stack traces and view objects.

ScriptBlock.

and test if they work as expected iteratively. In each iteration, after you edit the module code, how do you test the modification?

searches to locate modules

links I followed, the more detailed and complex everything got. At that point I felt I was not ready to contribute. But eventually, I did. And I realized there may be more people willing to contribute to PowerShell, but don't know where to start, and there does not seem to be a guide of how to do so in an easy way. Also, there are ways to contribute apart from writing C# code.

simply run them like a standard Windows program (EXE). Perhaps you'd like to prevent editing the code in a script or perhaps make it easier for your users to run scripts. It's time to learn how to convert a PS1 to an EXE.

industry's two most recognized experts on the subject.

interfaces between human and machine. Sometimes referred to as text-based user interfaces, they are starting to gain popularity again with projects like Terminal.Gui for .NET. In this guide, we take a deep dive into how to build TUIs with PowerShell and Terminal.Gui.

could be helpful to know what's going on in a particualar step or workflow. In this blog bost I will give you an overview and the basics you can build on to troubleshoot and investigate your script. Let's jump in.

high-performance, secure & ready-to-code workstations in the cloud. It gives companies the ability to pre-configure the development environment with all the tools needed to build, test, and deploy applications making developers more productive,

C#. This was to be a part of an advanced look at the things you can do with PowerShell 7 and DotNet Core.

easily add more commands. Here is all you need to know about PowerShell modules.

script and parameter input.

information when things don't work. The Trace-Command cmdlet is a valuable tool that gives you much information about what's going on behind the scenes. In this blog post, I will show you how to use it.

cmdlets.

and Strongly Encouraged Development Guidelines, but which naming convention do you use for internal variables?

your scripting to the next level and begin to think of your scripts as tools.

1.17 and includes all of the features from this previous blog post. Additionally, Windows Terminal Preview is getting an update to version 1.18 and will include all the features detailed here,