d-fens GmbH
Audit and Consulting of Information Systems and Business Processes
I am a senior auditor, consultant and architect at d-fens for business processes and information systems.
This is Microsoft PowerShell module is part of our Apache 2.0 based open source automation framework “Cumulus”. You will find all related posts via the “Cumulus” tag. You can use this module to perform provisioning against SCCM 2012 infrastructure (the module makes use and abstracts Microsoft’s supplied PowerShell module ‘ConfigurationManager’). You can download the module on GitHub or on NuGet […]
Microsoft PowerShell module manifests allow you to define scripts that are run prior to actual loading of the module itself. These scripts run in the caller’s scope (and not in the module’s scope) and can be defined by stating them in the ‘ScriptsToProcess’ attribute of the manifest. However, each of these scripts will appear as if they have been loaded […]
This Microsoft PowerShell module contains Cmdlets to work with RabbitMQ queues, send and receive messages. It uses a wrapper I earlier presented that solved the problem of loading the official RabbitMQ .NET client into a PowerShell session. These Cmdlets further facilitate the handling of sending and receiving of messages via AMQP queues. You can download the module on GitHub or […]
[UPDATE 2014-12-01] An update to this issue. It seem that this only appears PowerShell v3 and not in PowerShell v4 any more. When we create our Cmdlets we often supply a link to an Internet resource where we can put updated or more extensive help information. We normally do this in addition to providing some inline help in the Cmdlets. […]
Today we published our first package to NuGet! You can find it here: biz.dfch.PS.Cumulus.Utilities. This is the package for the basic PowerShell module needed to interact with our Cumulus automation framework, which you can use for all sorts of (PowerShell based) infrastructure automation. So what does that mean? You might have noticed that we started pushing some code out to […]
This one bit me, when trying to convert the inline help of a PowerShell cmdlet into some markdown enriched code for Github. For the PowerShell modules and Cmdlet we publish at github we sometimes use the integrated Wiki pages from Github to have some documentation on their use. We often also extract the full inline help and paste it to […]
Recently I observed a strange behavior when working with an ODATA service via a “System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext” that was wrapped inside a class library (via a regular “Service Reference”). The specific ODATA service in question was an Entity Framework v4.1 based service and had defined two different entity sets (“Objects” and “Tasks”) along with its regular CRUD operations. The specialty of the […]
Enhancing LightSwitch applications with additional ODATA or WebAPI controllers is a pretty common task. However when you try to build a CodeFirst based controller in combination with EntityFramework 6, you will run into a lot of errors by default. Here are the steps to get this cleared and running: 1. Create a Visual Studio LightSwitch HTML project In this example […]
Today I would like to present you a simple ODATA search controller that you can use in LightSwitch (or any other ODATA consumer) to look up user accounts (and possibly other objects). When using SharePoint you will probably know the very convenient PeoplePicker. However, in LightSwitch (HTML) there is no equivalent to that. You certainly have “Person” objects/data types but […]
This is the main module of our Apache 2.0 based open source automation framework “Cumulus”. We will be continuously adding help and documentation for it. You will find all related post via the “Cumulus” tag. You can download the module on GitHub at https://github.com/dfch/biz.dfch.PS.Cumulus.Utilities or on NuGet at https://www.nuget.org/packages/biz.dfch.PS.Cumulus.Utilities Most of the documentation can be found in the Wiki of […]
This module provides Cmdlets that let you work with Microsoft SQL Server database (regular and LocalDB) by utilising System.Data.SqlClient (instead of relying on the buggy ‘SqlServerCmdletSnapin100’ snapin and its ‘Invoke-Sqlcmd’ implementation. You can set a ‘DefaultPrefix’ or an alias to call it the same as the Microsoft SQL Server supplied ‘Invoke-Sqlcmd’. Furthermore you can work with LocalDB instances (as used […]
UPDATE 2015-03-15 we just released v1.0.5 which contains a few new Cmdlets such as Sending SMS to Clickatell via PowerShell. We are currently working on an automation project where we make use of several of our modules that we created in the past. In order to ease integration into the customer’s code and provide a legal basis for re-using the […]
[UPDATE 2014-10-21] the code and the assembly are now available under Apache 2.0 license on GitHub at https://github.com/dfch/biz.dfch.CS.System.Utilities [UPDATE 2014-12-10] see below for further details on this issue and a workaround to this that does not need PSRemoting Recently I observed a strange bug that occured when trying to invoke a PowerShell job via the Windows Task Scheduler. In my […]
When working with LightSwitch (HTML Client or not) you define your entity sets via the Designer and set their relations. As the whole database schema is automatically created and maintained […]
Today I show you how you can quickly use “JayData” to modify the contents of a LightSwitch HTML “drop-down list” (aka “choiceList”). Though it does not really offer all the blows and whistles as other controls such as “select2” it has some advantages like easy setup and good visual integration. And now with the use of JayData (and certainly with […]
One of the cool features in PowerShell is the string handling – especially that of XML and JSON, with the help of Cmdlets like “ConvertFrom-Json” and the like. This all works very well when quickly converting small pieces of JSON data. However, as it turns out they have quite some shortcomings, as you can quickly find out for yourself when […]
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