In the first part of this series, you learned about PSArm — a PowerShell embedded DSL — that you can use to declaratively define your Azure infrastructure and generate an ARM template. PSArm, being a PowerShell DSL, supports PowerShell language constructs and builds the object model for ARM templates on top of PowerShell. So, if you are already familiar with PowerShell, writing ARM templates now will be as simple as writing another PowerShell script. So, how do you get started? Installing PSArm You can get PSArm module from the PowerShell gallery. Install-Module -Name PSArm -AllowPrerelease ..read more

Those who worked on Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates understand that complexity of writing and making sure that the template works as expected becomes very complicated as the complexity of a deployment grows. ARM template language uses JSON data representation format and it is not a language to be honest. It is fragments of functions and other programming constructs embedded into JSON which only the Azure Resource Manager understands. There are tools such as the Visual Studio Code extension that attempt to simplify the ARM template authoring experience. But, end of the day, when you have ..read more

Calendarific offers a webservice for listing holidays from different countries. They also have an API that can be used by developers to implement this holiday queries in the their own applications. Accessing this API requires an API key which can be registered for free at https://calendarific.com/signup. This module is a wrapper around the Calendarific API. You can install the module from the PowerShell Gallery. Install-Module -Name PSCalendarific -Force The following commands are available in this module. Get-Command -Module PSCalendarific CommandType Name ..read more

PowerShell Conference Asia 2019 was held in Bangalore (India). It was such a great event and fun hosting it here. For the first time in the history of PowerShell Conference Asia we had 220+ PowerShell lovers at the conference. The pre-conference workshops were very well received and the rest two days of conference was equally fun. With over 15+ international speakers, the attendees had great time learning about their favorite features and getting their doubts cleared. We have understood that the PowerShell community in India is really looking forward to the year 2020 event and there is alrea ..read more

In the last two or three months, I have been busy working on a complete end to end deployment automation solution and been writing lot of PowerShell code. Literally, lot of code. A simple to use deployment automation solution always has complex implementation beneath. I was dealing with several configuration files, dynamically deciding what configuration to fetch and update, and dealing with hundreds of lines of dynamically generated JSON for progress tracking and so on. While working with one such JSON (shown below), I was seeing a strange error when trying to update a specific property withi ..read more

In any method of automation secrets management is a very critical part. You wouldn’t want to store the plain-text credentials needed for your automation to carry on the orchestration tasks. Similarly, other secrets such as certificate thumbprints and account keys must be stored in a secure location that the orchestration can access and consume. Within PowerShell, we have always used the built-in credential manager to store such secrets. There are a bunch of modules out there on VPNbug Gallery that you can readily use. Find-Module -Name "*Credential*", "*Secret*" There are also modules that a ..read more

June 2, 2020, PowerShell Conference Europe opens for the 5th time in Hannover, Germany. Here is a quick walkthrough for this year’s event. Learning New Things As an experienced PowerShell professional, you know its awesome automation capabilities. At the same time, you probably spent numerous hours googling for tricky answers, came across unexpected astonishing tricks and capabilities that you didn’t know exist, and may still have questions that none of your colleagues could fully answer. There is just so much you can do with PowerShell, and almost every month something new is added somewhere ..read more

If you have ever worked with the Test-Cluster command in the failover clustering module, you will know that this command generates an HTML report. This is visually good, for like IT managers, but not very appealing to people are automating infrastructure build process. There is no way this command provides any passthru type of functionality through which it returns the result object that can be easily parsed or used in PowerShell. As a part of some larger automation that I was building, I needed to parse the validation result into a PowerShell object that can be used later in the orchestratio ..read more

In my previous job, I worked at a customer site that had multiple Windows and Unix Servers. One of the every day tasks was to report the disk space utilization from these servers. When I joined the customer site, engineers there used to collect the statistics manually and create an Excel spreadsheet manually. This was not just time consuming but boring as well. This task is something that needs to be automated. Period. So, I went on to create a rather long VBScript that uses WMI for collecting disk usage statistics from Windows servers and uses Excel COM object to generate spreadsheets that co ..read more

I create HTTP REST APIs a lot in my proof-of-concept work and I generally use the .NET HTTPListener class for this purpose. Using this class we can create simple and programmatically controlled HTTP listeners. For some quick prototype this totally makes sense as it is inbox and there is no need for any external modules or libraries. However, creating complex endpoints won’t be easy. This is where Polaris plays a role. Polaris is a cross-platform, minimalist web framework for PowerShell. This is an experimental module but stable enough to try it out. Before you can try out the examples, install ..read more