Articles from May 2016 on PowerShell.org - Welcome Automaters!

Slack and PowerShell

Tue, 24 May 2016 12:51:46 +0000

Having a platform that enables ChatOps can be a game changer. You can quickly see changes, alerts, build status, discussions, emergency chats, and more, all in a single, searchable interface. If you can sift through the gifs.
Bots are a hot topic these days, and and it’s well worth checking out Matt Hodgkins bit on integrating PowerShell with Hubot. Bots are a great alternative to trying to spin up a web front end for PowerShell.
On top of bots, systems like Slack often offer a wealth of integrations, allowing you to hook into systems like Nagios, PagerDuty, GitHub, Trello, and many others.
Occasionally, you might have something that doesn’t integrate natively. Maybe you want to integrate Slack messages into your SCOM command notification channel, your CI/CD build process, orchestration system, configuration management systems, or even ad hoc scripts.
If you’re using Slack, check out the Slack API methods, or an incoming webhook. With the API in particular, you can do some handy stuff!
If you like the idea of re-usable tools and abstraction, check out PSSlack, a PowerShell module that we’re starting to build out, which can simplify sending messages, searching messages, and more.

Practical PowerShell Unit-Testing

Sun, 22 May 2016 20:44:14 +0000

By the time you are using PowerShell to automate an increasing amount of your system administration, database maintenance, or application-lifecycle work, you will likely come to the realization that PowerShell is indeed a first-class programming language and, as such, you need to treat it as such. That is, you need to do development in PowerShell just as you would with other languages, and in particular to increase robustness and decrease maintenance cost with unit tests and–dare I say–test-driven development (TDD). I put together several articles on getting started with unit tests and TDD in PowerShell using Pester, the leading test framework for PowerShell. This series introduces you to Pester and provides what I like to call “tips from the trenches” on using it most effectively, along with a gentle prodding towards a TDD style.
Part 1: Getting Started with the Pester Framework
Starting with the ubiquitous “Hello, World”, this introduces Pester, showing how to execute tests, how to start writing tests, and the anatomy of a test.
Part 2: Mock Objects and Parameterized Test Cases
To be able to create true unit tests, you need to be able to isolate your functions and modules to be able to focus on the component under test; mocks provide great support for doing that. Another topic of “power” unit tests is making them parameterizable, i.e. being able to run several scenarios through a single test simply by providing different inputs.
Part 3: Validating Data and Call History
The final part of this series provides a “how-to” for several other key parts of Pester: how to validate data, how to determine if something was called appropriately, and how to address a particular challenge with Pester, validating arrays. I’ve included a library for array validation to supplement Pester.
For a more general treatment of unit tests, I refer you to Roy Osherove’s canonical text on the subject, The Art of Unit Testing.

Getting complex – More line breaks in Powershell

Sat, 21 May 2016 20:09:16 +0000

This is a follow up to Jacob Moran’s articleKeeping it simple - Line breaks in PowerShell.
I am strongly in the pro backtick camp, but I won’t get into that debate here. Instead, I’ll cover more of the common ground between the two camps.
In addition to after a pipe, there are many, many more places where you can put in a line break without a backtick and without breaking your code.
As a rule of thumb, any spot where the syntax unambiguously must be followed by something more, you can break the line.
As an extreme example, this:

= @( “a”

“b”

“c” ) If ( $A

[

]

. ToString() -eq

[

]

. Length -or ( Get-Date ) . Date . DayOfWeek -eq

‘Tuesday’ ) { [pscustomobject] @{ Name

Articles from May 2016 on PowerShell.org - Welcome Automaters!

Slack and PowerShell

Practical PowerShell Unit-Testing

Getting complex – More line breaks in Powershell

‘Tuesday’ ) { [pscustomobject] @{ Name

Boston PSUG Kick Off Meeting Tomorrow

Making Awesome Dashboards from Windows Performance Counters

Dutch PowerShell User Group opens its doors on Slack

Your feedback wanted! New eBook Hosting for PowerShell.org

MSPSUG May 10th Virtual Meeting: Acceptance Testing PowerShell DSC with Test-Kitchen

GET YOUR STICKERS!!! (AND WALLPAPERS!!!) (AND INTERNATIONAL STICKERS!!!)

United States

Articles from May 2016 on PowerShell.org - Welcome Automaters!

Slack and PowerShell

Practical PowerShell Unit-Testing

Getting complex – More line breaks in Powershell

‘Tuesday’ ) { [pscustomobject] @{ Name

[ pscustomobject] @{ Name