New Projects

My previous employer kindly allowed me to opensource my work. The time has come to put this work in the public domain. The core project consisted of PowerShell scripts to add NuGet functionality to Visual Studio SQL Server database projects. My implementation was over-complicated, so I will be simplifying things. That will be my first …

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Managing complex PowerShell applications

A single script was a reasonable solution to the problem of deploying any changes to developers and build servers, but maintenance was a horror. It best suited me to use Windows Explorer to index the functions, and to use Notepad++ for viewing them.

Prototyping with PowerShell

Requirements, specification, design and implementation Requirement We have two NuGet servers. The primary server is locally hosted for the developers. The second server is an Azure DevOps NuGet feed for contractors typically working outside the firewall. A scheduled task synchronizing the two servers runs hourly, copying any new packages from the local server to the …

Downloading an Azure DevOps Universal Package from the Command Line

Automating Azure DevOps There are several ways in which Azure DevOps can be automated with scripts. Here I show how to use the AZ command line tool retrieve an artifact created by a build pipeline. Understanding how to use a CLI tool is the first requirement for automation. The Azure DevOps CLI provides access to …

A NuGet List item parser – Part 2: Including Pre-release packages

In Part 1 I reorganised my NuGet source synchronization tool's code to make it testable, with the specific aim of allowing pre-release packages to be synchronized. In particular, the affected code was isolated into this function: function Parse-PackageItem { param( [string]$Package ) $idVer = $Package.Split(' ') if ($idVer.Length -eq 2) { $id = $idVer[0] [string]$ver …

A NuGet List item parser – Part 1: Making legacy code testable

I am building a tool to synchronize two NuGet servers. One is hosted on a development server, and the other is in the cloud. I need to add support for Pre-Release packages. In the first of two parts, I refactor the code to make it testable. The existing code This tool started its life as …

Parameterizing Scripts with PowerShell Data Files

In my previous blog I introduced the Get-Blacklist function which turned a string array into a hashtable for quick comparisons: function Get-Blacklist { param( [string[]]$Blacklist ) $blacklistHash = @{} $Blacklist | % { $blacklistHash[$_] = $true } $blacklistHash } and invoked it thus: . .\Scripts\Get-Blacklist.ps1 @blacklist = Get-Blacklist -Blacklist 'Powershell','Sandbox','sqlccJamie','Graphics','CentinelTest','Backoffice Service Portal' As a rule I …

Building a script module

Like I said in the previous blog, I like to write short functions and keep each in its own file in source control. The problem is then to make these functions accessible. The usual approach is to dot-source them. I'm not particularly wild about the idea, but let's have a look at that first. Sample …

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me! Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton About this blog I have been a programmer for a very long time, and have learned a few things getting here. I want to share those things. For the last few years I have been working on a …