d-fens GmbH
Audit and Consulting of Information Systems and Business Processes
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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 […]
Following the very cool series of ODATA articles on the ASP.NET site by Mike Wasson you will see that it is possible to define actions not only on entities directly, but also (unbound) on entity sets and the service root itself. While it is fairly straightforward to implement entity set action (the same as an entity action but without the […]
I recently wrote on how you can call ODATA actions via PowerShell. However, sometimes these actions return entity types that you cannot resolve easily in PowerShell. Normally you would resort to “Execute()”, but this is neither easily doable in PowerShell. But as most usual there is another way around this. Instead of using “Execute()” to retrieve the data you rely […]
This is a quick addition to my previous blog post on how to receive SignalR messages via PowerShell. Once you have established a connection in PowerShell to your SignalR hub you can easily them a message to the server via the ‘Invoke()’ method on the IHubProxy object. In it you specify the name of the method you want to call […]
A couple of days ago I wrote about how to use RabbitMQ with AMQP from PowerShell (via a small assembly that utilized the original C# .NET Client). After I implemented it in the use case for our customer I somehow felt it to be “too heavy” for what I was really using it (compared to all the features AMQP has to […]
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