devLink 2013 Retrospective

I realize this is late now, but I’ve finally both recovered from devLink 2013 and (most importantly) caught up to the point that I can think about blog posts again. What a great time that was. I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed devLink. This was my first devLink (and obviously my first time presenting …

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Unhelpful PowerShell Azure Message

Even though my day job does not do much with Azure (right now), I thought I should spend some time becoming familiar with the PowerShell connections available to Azure. I’m hardly stretching the state of the art here, but I have had more than a couple of instances lately where standing up a quick website …

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CodeStock 2013 Retrospective

Another CodeStock is in the books. Just like every year, I had a great time, and I learned a lot. There were many great sessions this year and I’ll be digesting this information for a while. One of the things that struck me this year is that, even though there were great sessions, some of …

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PowerShell for Fun and Irritation

If you’re a fan of the show “Family Guy”, you may remember the joke where Robert Loggia was asked to spell his name. He did so by working his name into a sentence for every letter. For example, “E as in everybody loves Robert Loggia.” We’ve started doing that around the office, with the challenge …

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Upcoming Conference Sessions

Conference season is almost upon us. Codestock is coming up in mid-July and DevLink at the end of August. I’m really looking forward to some focused learning as well as getting to “geek out” with some other developers. If you haven’t yet signed up for Codestock, you should do so if travel to Knoxville, TN …

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devLink 2013 RetrospectiveUnhelpful PowerShell Azure MessageCodeStock 2013 RetrospectivePowerShell for Fun and IrritationUpcoming Conference Sessions

Aug 28

Cleaning Up Peer Review Branches Made Easy with PowerShell

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git, PowerShell

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Maybe I’m in the minority, but whenever I start working on a peer review, the first thing I do is create a branch in git. That way if I have any comments or edits, I already have everything setup and I don’t have to lose my train of thought by closing the solution, create a branch, re-open the solution and hope I remember what I was going to say.

I’m not, however, very good at cleaning up those branches when I’m done. After our last sprint, I had 45 orphaned peer review branches. Because I use a consistent naming scheme (peer-StoryID), this could either be a lot of typing, or I could use PowerShell to make it easy.

git branch | sls "peer" | %{ git branch -d $_.Line.Trim() }

That will grab the list of all branches that contain the text “peer” and remove them. The extra Trim() is because I was getting branches names prefixed by 3-5 spaces from the output.

Can you think of a better way to do this? Post it in the comments below!

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Aug 04

PowerShell, Dropbox, and Windows Live Writer

Categories:

Blogging, PowerShell

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I think I have a problem. I cannot use just one computer. I have work computers, home computers, and computers I use exclusively on the couch while watching TV. I really like to keep all of these computers in sync so I have all of my files, programs and configuration no matter where I am. For the most part, Dropbox lets me do that. But every now and then, something like Windows Live Writer comes along that with a hard coded save path.

Fortunately, Gabriel Novo shows the solution using Junctions and third-party downloadable tool. That’s great, but surely there’s a PowerShell way to do this, right? Turns out the answer is yes, provided you have PowerShell Community Extensions installed. If you don’t, stop reading right now and get it installed.

The answer is as simple as PSCX’s New-Junction cmdlet. The parameters are named backward from what I initially interpreted them to be, but that’s not a problem. LiteralPath points to the “fake” folder you’re making, and TargetPath points to the folder to which you’re linking. So given that my Windows username is Nathan and I have everything installed to the default locations, I simply run:

New-Junction ` 
     -LiteralPath 'C:UsersNathanDocumentsMy Weblog Posts' ` 
     -TargetPath 'C:UsersNathanDropboxMy Weblog Posts'

Done. I now have Windows Live Writer unknowingly syncing local drafts to Dropbox. That’s on one system of course, so you’ll have to do that on each system you use. Or do you? Find out in the next post, where I continue blogging about blogging.

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Jun 18

Slides from Codestock 2012 Talk

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PowerShell

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Thanks to everyone that came to my “Introductory PowerShell by (Real-World) Example” talk.  Here are my slides from that talk.

Edit: A friend noticed that I forgot to update the link to this file when I updated my blog engine. It should be working correctly now.

Introductory PowerShell by (Real-World) Example

 

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May 11

Come learn about PowerShell

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PowerShell

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Come see me at CodeStock (June 15-16 2012) as I present my session “Introductory PowerShell by (Real-World) Example”.  This session is geared toward people that have no PowerShell experience, but I hope that even lightly-experienced users will get something out of it.  It’s a developer-focused session, so the theme is automating your work and finding problems.  I won’t be covering topics more suited to IT administration, such as Exchange or SharePoint administration.

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