Teach Splating or Die!

Intro

This post is directed at mentors, trainers, documentation authors, and forum/chat helpers in the PowerShell community. This post is not a tutorial on splatting. I think the topic of splatting has been covered very well by many others.

I am imploring those of you in the PowerShell community to teach splatting early and often. By early, I mean it should be covered in the first few lessons of any 101 materials. By often, I mean that you should stop using backticks and consider using splats for any thing that uses 3 or more parameters.

I have had many discussions with many community leaders over the years and I'm a bit disappointed in the general aversion to teaching splatting as a part of introductory PowerShell. I have heard endless excuses that all sound like "my students are stupid" in my head. I'm sure many of you are making such arguments with the kindest of intentions, but I can't help but think you are insulting PowerShell novices.

I hope this blog post can assist in changing your mind and provide some guidance on how to approach teaching the subject early and often.

Call For Presenters: The PowerShell Conference Book Volume 2

Calling All PowerShell and DevOps Authors, Presenters, Bloggers, and Enthusiasts!

The Call for Presenters (authors) is open for “The PowerShell Conference Book: Volume 2” until Friday May 31 at 11:00 PM EST. We are looking for one chapter per author on the topics of PowerShell and DevOps. All proceeds for the book will go to the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit OnRamp Scholarships.
Those interested should submit a chapter abstract to the PSConfBook 2 CFP form at http://bit.ly/PSConfBook2CFP before the deadline. Authors may submit multiple abstracts, but only one abstract per author will be selected for inclusion in the book.

On to New Endeavors: My New Role at LinkedIn

On May 18th I posted a tweet that made public my intent to find a new job. I’m happy to announce that search is over!

I have accepted an offer at LinkedIn with a tentative start date in the coming weeks.

I have waited to announce this publicly until I was sure there were no roadblocks. It has been a kind of open secret as I haven’t shied away from sharing it with anyone who asked directly.

This blog is to share that news and a little bit about the circumstances around the change.

Why Invoke-RestMethod and ConvertFrom-Json Have Funky Pipelines

Intro

At least once a week I am either directly asked to @-mentioned into a question about why Invoke-RestMethod and/or ConvertFrom-Json don’t play nice with the pipeline. I decided to put this into a blog post so I can just point people to it in the future.

Note that this blog entry was written while PowerShell 6.0.2 was current and 6.1.0 was on the way. This behavior may change in future versions.

PowerShell Core 6.1 Web Cmdlets Roadmap

Intro

Recently the PowerShell Team published their PowerShell Core 6.1 Roadmap. Several questions have come up about 6.1 plans for Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod. You may have noticed there is no mention of the Web Cmdlets in their roadmap. That is because the majority of the feature work for the cmdlets is being done by yours truly. As I am a community member and not a Microsoft employee, it would make sense that my work is not included in their blog. Anyway, I felt it was a good idea to share what I have in store for the next 6 months.

I should warn that this is more accurately called "Mark Kraus's PowerShell Core 6.1 Web Cmdlets Wish List" rather than a roadmap. I only have 2 features that are pretty much approved. The rest will depend on whether or not the changes actually get accepted. Also, I'm not part of any team working on this. It's just me and the issue queue back log of feature requests and bugs. If your company wants to hire me to work full time on the Web Cmdlets, then hit me up. Otherwise, this is all a side project for me and life happens. So please don't hold me to any deadlines! :)

New Feature for 6.1: Resume Partial Downloads with Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod

Intro

I’m excited to announce a new feature for Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod that will ship with PowerShell Core 6.1.0: Resume Downloads!

This is a feature that has been requested many times throughout the years and I’m please to say that it will be included in the next release of PowerShell Core. You should be able to preview the feature in 6.1.0-preview.2.

You can se the code changes in PR #6447.

Peanut Butter and Chocolate: Azure Functions CI/CD Pipeline with AWS CodeCommit (Part 6 of 6)

Part 6

In Part 5 we configured the AWS CodeCommit to trigger the AWS Lambda when a commit is made to the master branch of the repository. Effectively, our CI/CD pipeline is in place. To use it properly, we first need to add a cc2af.yml configuration file. After the configuration file is there, we can push out first Azure Function to our AWS CodeCommit repository and our AWS Lambda will be triggered and start a manual deployment on the Azure Functions Web App.

We will finish out the series in this post with demonstrating an automatic deployment from AWS CodeCommit to Azure Functions and triggering our Azure Function all from PowerShell.

Series Table of Contents

• Part 1 of 6: Project Introduction and Overview
  
• Part 2 of 6: Project Settings, Authentication, Azure Function App Deployment, and AWS Code Commit Deployment
  
• Part 3 of 6: Creating AWS IAM User for Git, Generating HTTPS Git Credentials, Configuring Azure Web App External Git Deployment, and Initial Manual Deployment
• Part 4 of 6: Create AWS IAM Role, Deploy the C# .NET Core 2.0 AWS Lambda, and Create an AWS KMS Key
• Part 5 of 6: Add AWS CodeCommit Trigger and Encrypt Secrets with AWS KMS
• Part 6 of 6 (This post): Generate Configuration File, Automatic deployment from AWS CodeCommit to Azure Functions, Trigger the Azure Function from PowerShell, and Series Conclusion