Intro This is a short post to demonstrate how you can use a cache in Azure DevOps (Azure Pipelines) to store any PowerShell module that you need during your pipeline. Don’t let your pipeline rely on the availability PowerShell Gallery! This goes for anything really, but in this post I’m focusing on the PowerShell Gallery. There are two simple reasons for this statement: Downloading modules from the gallery takes time, not something I want to do every time I run my pipeline ..read more

This post is part of a series about Azure Functions and PowerShell. Check out the list of other posts in the series! So far we have se up an Azure Function app and configured authentication and authorization using Azure Active Directory. Now everything works as long as we expect users to hit our function with a browser. I often use functions to build an API that is being called by code ..read more

This post is part of a series about Azure Functions and PowerShell. Check out the list of other posts in the series! In the last post on Azure Functions and Azure AD authentication we looked at how to require authentication for our Function App. Now we know who accessess our function, it’s time to have a look at Authorization, meaning now that we know who they are, should we let them in ..read more

This post is part of a series about Azure Functions and PowerShell. Check out the list of other posts in the series! Azure Functions and Azure AD authentication Azure Functions are easy, cheap and scalable. PowerShell is a powerful language perfect for automating and authoring integrations that “glue” systems together. This is a match made in heaven for me, but how do I know and validate who calls my code? This is where Authentication enters the scene ..read more

This post is part of a series about Azure Functions and PowerShell. Check out the list of other posts in the series! Intro Creating an Azure Function in the Azure Portal is super easy, just hit Add, select “Function App”, hit Create and fill in the form. This works for a demo, but it only gives us a simple Function App without any customization. There are a few things I always tend to customize when I want to run a Function App in production (or production-like) environments ..read more

Azure Functions is an awesome serverless offering from Microsoft. It lets you deploy a small piece of code as a “function” without having to worry about any underlying infrastructure. A function will then execute on a given event, which for example could be an event from an event service like Event Grid or Event Hubs, a message on a queue like Azure ServiceBus or Azure storage queues, a direct HTTP request like an API call or a webhook, or a timer ..read more

I use a lot of different computers and I have a thing for reimaging my computers way too often. All in all, this means that I find myself sitting in front of a newly installed computer quite often. One thing that I always to on a fresh computer is to clone a bunch of repos from my personal organization in Azure DevOps that contains my notes and a selection of tools that I want available everywhere I go ..read more

Intro Have you ever wanted to query an API that uses access tokens from Azure Active Directory (AzureAD) from a PowerShell script? There are a lot of solutions for this that uses an application in AzureAD and authenticates using its client-id and secret. If I have a web application or a non-interactive service this is the way to go. My friend and colleague Emanuel Palm wrote a great post on Microsoft Graph API with PowerShell for that scenario ..read more

Intro I’ve been asked the question on “How can I turn my script to an exe-file” more times than I can remember. My answer has always been: -“Just host Windows PowerShell in an executable and run what ever code you like.” Scared of using C# most people has ignored my advice and used some kind of tool to do this, and there is no fault in that (as long as you choose a tool from a provider you trust, not a random tool from a shade site on the Internet ..read more

Intro Even though we have group managed service account, regular user accounts are still used by various services and applications. The passwords for these accounts are (hopefully) hard to remember and might be shared by a group of people. This means that when it’s time to modify that service , scheduled task or application we haven’t touched in years I really want to make sure I have the right username and password before I start ..read more