Category: Powershell

Cody Konior wants to speed up module loading:

One of the more heated ideas is that you should combine all of your scripts into a massive file and execute it once instead. Currently dbatools uses a mix of these techniques in great detail and to great success.

I don’t want to use a single file because I don’t like build the idea of a pre-compile build pipeline for a scripting language, so here’s an alternative and benchmarks of how these techniques stack up (taken on Windows 10 PS 5.1 obviously your results may differ).

Check out Cody’s example.

James Livingston shows us how to redirect the standard in flow with .NET, using Powershell as the example language:

Command Line Interface (CLI) tools can be very useful for interacting with certain applications. However, some CLIs do not let a user pass in parameters which makes it difficult to automate. Instead, they lock a user into an interactive session and force the user to enter commands. Fortunately, some programming languages allow for a redirection of the standard input, output, and error of an running process. A developer co-worker of mine has been very successful doing this in Java, which got me thinking… And turns out, using the .NET libraries, we can implement this functionality for any CLI in PowerShell.

Automating interactions with CLI programs is often not ideal but when you’re stuck, it does the trick.

Craig Porteous explains how you can use Chocolatey to manage Windows packages:

In my own words, it’s the quickest way to get a machine up and running, ready to start working. Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows that allows you to script out the installation of (what feels like) almost anything. I was able to get up and running on a new laptop in just a few hours, while I worked on something else. Forget constant Next > Next > Next installation wizards. I had all the tools I needed to do my job, not just apps but PowerShell modules too, all installed automatically.

I’ve pulled packages but never created one. It’s definitely something that should go on my to-learn list given how often I build and rebuild machines and VMs.

Jess Pomfret takes us through resources in Desired State Configuration:

A critical part of our DSC configuration is made up of resources. These are the building blocks we need to to define our desired state.  There are two kinds of resources that we can use: class based and MOF based (most common). We are going to focus our efforts today on looking at MOF based resources.

Resources come packaged up as modules and our servers, which use at least WMF 4.0, come with several built-in. We have two main options for additional resources; we can find DSC resource modules in the PowerShell Gallery or we can write our own.

Jess wraps up the post with five useful resources for database administrators.

Kevin Marquette has a new Powershell module:

JiraPS is a wonderful module that is great at a lot of things. There several great people that have put a lot of time into it for it to have such good feature coverage. It was designed to be approachable and do a lot of validation for you. JiraPS does not have a good user story around bulk operations with its issue commands and thats what I need from it the most.

It also has a large user base with hundreds of thousands of downloads and is used in a lot of organizations. Every change made to that module at this point needs to pay very close attention to backwards compatibility.

Now there are two modules depending on your use case.