Tag: PowerShell

Install PowerShell Modules on hosted agent in VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services)

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is popular tool of choice for various purposes where product is heavily dependent on Microsoft technologies like .NET, Azure, etc. It does lot of work such as Source code management, Building CI/CD pipelines, Package Management, Agile Issue tracking, etc. It is a cloud hosted service offering from Microsoft.

Hosted agent is a build agent that is provided by Microsoft for build and continuous integration purposes. However, you don’t have much control over the configuration of the hosted agent. It comes with most of tools you would normally require for building your source code. Now, when building PowerShell, it will come with latest version of PowerShell, so you can use built in package management cmdlets like Install-Module. Occasionally, you would need to install custom PowerShell modules such as SqlServer (Formerly known as SQLPS). Continue reading “Install PowerShell Modules on hosted agent in VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services)” →

Running PowerShell Core in a docker container

PowerShell core is the edition of PowerShell built on top of .NET Core. It is sometimes simplified to “CoreCLR”, though it technically includes CoreFX as well.

PowerShell Core is cross-platform, available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, thanks to the cross-platform nature of .NET Core. On PowerShell Core, $PSVersionTable.PSEdition is set to Core.

Do note that  while PowerShell Core 6.0 is cross-platform, there is also a PowerShell Core 5.0/5.1 released exclusively as part of Nano Server. In this blog post, we’ll learn how to run PowerShell core in a docker container. Continue reading “Running PowerShell Core in a docker container” →

Navigate to current user’s path in PowerShell

I guess everyone knows that you can find current logged-in user’s profile path using variable $env:USERPROFILE, which is one of the built in environmental variables in PowerShell. However, you can also choose to navigate to current user’s profile path using ‘~’ (without single quotes). So for an example would be:

PS data [07/11/2017 09:58:00]> pwd

Path
----
C:\data

PS data [07/11/2017 09:58:01]> cd ~
PS mogoyal[07/11/2017 09:58:05]> pwd

Path
----
C:\Users\mogoyal

However, unlike $env:userprofile, you can not use this in write-host to print out the value of the path.

Determine .NET Framework versions installed using PowerShell

Users can install and run multiple versions of the .NET Framework on their computers. When you develop or deploy your app, you might need to know which .NET Framework versions are installed on the user’s computer. Note that the .NET Framework consists of two main components, which are versioned separately:

  1. A set of assemblies, which are collections of types and resources that provide the functionality for your apps. The .NET Framework and assemblies share the same version number.
  2. The common language runtime (CLR), which manages and executes your app’s code. The CLR is identified by its own version number (see Versions and Dependencies). Continue reading “Determine .NET Framework versions installed using PowerShell” →

Ignore self-signed certificates in PowerShell

When using windows PowerShell as REST client, you may encounter certificate invalid issues for various reasons. The most likely reason should be a self-signed certificate or a invalid common name certificate or sometimes not adding SAN names in the certificates. This may cause your script to break if it relies on fetching data from remote server when communicating on HTTPS.

To avoid SSL Certificate trust issues if using HTTPS, we can use below PowerShell function to help: Continue reading “Ignore self-signed certificates in PowerShell” →

Using POST method in REST API in PowerShell

In one of previous blog post, we discussed how to work with using REST APIs in PowerShell. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to use POST method in REST API.

POST involve sending both a body and headers.

  $person = @{
      first='joe'
      lastname='doe'
   }
   $body = (ConvertTo-Json $person)
   $hdrs = @{}
   $hdrs.Add("X-API-KEY","???")
   $hdrs.Add("X-SIGNATURE","234j123l4kl23j41l23k4j")
   $hdrs.Add("X-DATE","12/29/2016")
   Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $url -Method Post -Body $body -ContentType 'application/json' -Headers $hdrs
   ConvertTo-Json

The above on several lines is easier to read than one long line: Continue reading “Using POST method in REST API in PowerShell” →