Monthly Archives: April 2016

NDC Sydney and other various things

I almost forgot to mention. I’ll be speaking at NDC Sydney in August 2016 on the topic of Windows Automation, Continuous Delivery, PowerShell, Robots and World Domination.

The speaker line-up is kind of stellar and this will, I guess, be the highest profile tech conference at which I’ve spoken thus far. I promise to rehearse deeply and not get distracted about trivia such as which idiom in which one should code.

I will be sharing the stage with Fabien Ruffin, who is also speaking at the Sydney AWS Summit on the topic of New Relic. I will be an wandering around that conference and asking people awkward questions while probably sporting a purple hair-dye job and generally making a nuisance of myself while people try to extract sensible answers about Windows workloads in the AWS Cloud.

I will also be around the Sydney DevOps and Cloud meetup scene a bit in the next few months, discussing Windows, Cloud and Automation stuff in-between moments of objectionable surliness and plugging my NDC session.

You have been warned.

A tedious and probably totally wrong post about idiomatic approaches to PowerShell

In PowerShell, there are many ways to do stuff.

This is a good thing. It’s what made Perl so attractive to me back when I wrote in unreadable languages. There was even an acronym. TIMTOWTDI. There Is More Than One Way To Do It.

This is good. It’s a great thing.

Which is what I thought of today, when browsing around the interwebs, I stumbled*, not for the first time, over a not-that-common but still sometimes-encountered PowerShell idiom for function declaration.

$func = {
    param($input)
    write "I am a function. Your input was $input"
}

&$func

Continue reading →

Stricter DSC processing under WMF 5.0

If you’re all being good little Windows opscoders, you’ll be using DSC. And if, like me, you’ve upgraded to WMF 5.0 (PowerShell 5.0), you may have noticed a few new warning messages popping up in your logs

You do look at your logs, right?

Good.

Well, you may have been seeing this little warning of late

WARNING: The configuration ‘ExampleDSCConfig’ is loading one or more built-in resources without explicitly importing associated modules. Add Import-DscResource –ModuleName ‘PSDesiredStateConfiguration’ to your configuration to avoid this message.

I’ve certainly been seeing it. It hasn’t done any harm. Nothing breaks, it’s just a warning. I’ll get round to fixing it eventually.

Well, in the last day or so, I rolled WMF 5.0 into my production server fleet – a couple of hundred servers all up – and today I’ve had developers asking me why their Octopus Deploy projects are generating warnings now.  Continue reading →