Powershell on Lets Automate It

Python vs Powershell Part 1: Versioning

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 21:20:15 -0400

I posted a tweet earlier this week asking if anyone would be interested in a small series of posts that explain the differences between Python and PowerShell.

So, here we go!

Python on macOS

Python and PowerShell are quite a bit different from each other. Python has been around for several years and works on multiple operating systems. Additionally, Python is beloved by it’s extremely supportive open-source community; rightfully so! Python is fast and portable, and is a go to for most developers.

Using Amazon SNS With Powershell

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 20:51:46 -0400

Simple Notification Service (SNS) from Amazon Web Services (AWS) can work in conjunction with AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS), Lambda Functions, HTTP APIs/endpoints, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and so on. As PowerShell continues to gain attraction with IT professionals around the globe, you can use SNS along with other services to create powerful applications to help your business win.

Amazon SNS lets your application deliver notifications to additional services or applications, depending on your use case. SNS is becoming more and more common in microservice architecture designs around the globe. If your application needs to communicate with multiple endpoints or you need multiple applications to communicate to a central service, you should consider AWS SNS.

Using Amazon Sqs With Powershell

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 22:24:59 -0400

Amazon SQS is a flexible queue service that has many uses cases, from scalable web applications and processing systems to inter-application communications. This is useful if you need to process lots of data at once or have threads or workers to do a specific action to a large pool of data.

With the explosion of use cases for PowerShell and Docker in production systems, you can easily scale using queue systems like Amazon SQS. SQS is beneficial when your service or application has job workers that need to perform actions based on a large pool of data.

Traverse Local Certificate Store With Powershell

Tue, 21 Aug 2018 12:50:50 -0400

Windows Certificate Store is typically accessed using the MMC Snap-In, You can view both the Computer or User certificate stores using a traditional MMC console. Sometimes though, you may just want to programmatically access it using PowerShell. Luckily you can do this using a PSDrive that is created on your machine.

As you can see there is a Cert drive and you can access it using PowerShell’s multiple location based Cmdlets. For example, if you can use cd Cert:\ and it will change your current directory to the certificate PSDrive. You can also use Set-Location,Push-Location, Pop-Location etc. when access your PSDrives.

Powershell Console, Scripts, Functions, Modules, Cmdlets, Oh My!

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 13:37:36 -0400

PowerShell is unique, but it is also necessary in today’s world. I find that newcomers to the language are sometimes confused or don’t understand the basic layers of PowerShell scripting. You can use PowerShell in different ways, but I have yet to find an all encompassing article that explains the high-level of how to interact with PowerShell in these different ways.

This post will explain the different concepts (or layers) of PowerShell code organization and their main advantages and use cases. We will dive into the different approaches of implementing PowerShell and why you would use one over the other.

Using Github to Revive Blog Posts

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 10:08:33 -0400

I am currently migrating my blog content from Wordpress.com to GitHub pages using Hugo. During this transition, I wanted to have the ability to “revive” my blog posts on a scheduled basis on social media (e.g. Twitter). With Wordpress, you can use the WordPress Revive Old Posts plugin but with WordPress.com you have to have a premium business account to use plugins.

If you’re in a similar situation of if you want a free way to automate the “re-posting” of your blog content then you’re in luck! Below I have listed some initial requirements that are needed to use this process.

Adding a Dlls Certificate to a Trusted Store

Wed, 08 Aug 2018 23:08:02 -0400

Yesterday I was asked to help with streamling a manual process that some QA folks were running into. They had a debug release of an applicaiton that was signed with a test code signing certificate. Part of the process was that they needed to select a DLL, view the certificate, and then install the certificate into the machines trusted certificate store.

This is a extremely simple task, but it was just an annoyance, so I wrote a few lines of code to autoamte this for them.