d-fens GmbH
Audit and Consulting of Information Systems and Business Processes
Microsoft PowerShell
Today I was playing with TFS Power Tools to check in some PowerShell scripts where I ran into a strange error. Obviously I wanted to use the PowerShell Cmdlets for that you can select via the ‘Custom’ option in the ‘Power Tools’ installer … For a quick intro on TFS via PowerShell you can have a look at PowerShell and […]
Have you ever tried to use ODATA Actions from PowerShell and realized that the Service Reference in your class library does not expose them? You can actually do it via the model’s ‘Execute()’ method. Here is a quick description on how to do it without writing too much URL style code. Let’s presume we have a model referenced in a […]
When working with ODATA sources from PowerShell via a service reference (instead of using explicit REST call via Invoke-RestMethod) the .NET DataServiceClient will use Atom/XML under the hood. This works perfectly well except it consumes much more bandwidth because of the XML data format. As the whole ODATA interface is encapsulated via your service reference it really does not make […]
I just came across another nuisance in .NET WebAPI that I want to share with you quickly. In one of our LightSwitch projects we use WebAPI ODATA controller to help out when LightSwitch internal capabilities come to their end. As we are using a PowerShell once in a while as you might already have guessed from our web site we […]
It might sound old school and the JIRA SOAP service is announced to be removed with version 7 (https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/Preparing+for+JIRA+6.0#PreparingforJIRA6.0-SOAPandXML-RPCdeprecatedinJIRA6.0) but the JIRA SOAP protocol is really easy to use from PowerShell as of the nifty ‘New-WebServiceProxy’ Cmdlet that abstract the SOAP protocol behind typed .Net objects. So whenever you want to do a quick upload of a screenshot or get […]
When you try to add an assembly that you downloaded from a network share or the internet to your PowerShell session via ‘Add-Type -Path C:\folder\your-assembly-name.dll’ you might a receive an error like this: The result itself could give you a hint and querying the inter you will probably others experiencing the same error as described in Visual Studio Project Sample […]
Graylog2 comes with a very limited alerting feature where you can basically only create alerts based on a single field. However, and thus far I can follow the motivation of […]
Graylog2 is a powerful and scalable open source log management and data analytics system on top of elasticsearch. Since our logging module is based on log4net, the integration of Graylog2 […]
Finally I made it and found the time to upload the biz.dfch.PS.vCAC.Utilties PowerShell module! It is available for download at Github and NuGet (see below for links) and placed under the Apache 2.0 license. How to install: Copy the module along with the XML configuration file into a directory with the same name as the module under a path that […]
Here is a quick post as a reminder because I tend to forget myself and documentation on the Internet is not really pointing you to the solution right away … When using the ADSI provider in PowerShell (for example to use WinNT) and you want to perform the actual operation with different credentials than the currently logged on user you […]
Using the built-in RBAC feature of LightSwitch is really cool and easy to use until you have to assign all of your application defined permissions to roles and users. This is usually where the Administration DesktopClient does not scale too well… But of course there is help: and it is especially easy, when you utilize PowerShell to tackle that task. […]
When you have a vCAC stub (i.e. ‘BuildingMachine’ or any other stub) and invoke a script or process (like a PowerShell script) and from that script you start a new process as direct descendant of the original process it will be killed by vCAC when the stub exits. vCAC seems to search all processes and compares their Parent ProcessID against […]
The vCAC user interface is functional but has quite some limitations when you want to do selection based on different criteria the user enters. So for example, it is not possible to have cascading dropdown lists based on two parent lists or values. Furthermore you cannot select a physicl machine based on its location. And there are plenty more examples […]
Did you ever get the response from VMware support or anyone else ‘for this you need a CDK license to make it work’? As it turns out this is a costly thing to have and in most cases you will not need it anyway. In addition, if you really come across something the ‘CloudUtil.exe’ does not let you do, you […]
Some time back I showed a way on how one can change the placement while provisioning. The central problem is that the placement takes place in that moment when the user submits his machine request. So at any step during the provisioning the placement has already been determined and resources already have been allocated. During my research regarding the import […]
Besides the well used ManagementContext vCAC also has some SOAP services for basic infrastructure communication and provisioning. With the ProvisionService, VMPS for short, you get a wrapper around some basic vCAC workflows and helper functions that abstract data manipulation of the MangementContext and others. Using this service with PowerShell is pretty straightforward with the help of the ‘New-WebServiceProxy’ Cmdlet. For […]
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