Welcome to the site, my name is Jeff and I have been working in the IT field since the early 90's. Most of what I post here is related to work that I do for the various companies that I have worked for over the years. Please feel free to look around ask questions or post comments (if available).
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Recent Posts
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How I work
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of development work in C# and PowerShell. The bulk has been PowerShell modules, but I’ve also done quite a bit of work on API’s and Azure DevOps extensions. But one thing is fairly consistent throughout, the need to work with the code in a reliable and repeatable manner. I use psake for Build Automation tasks and for the past few weeks I’ve been iterating on my various automation scripts and have gotten to the point where I think I have something that’s pretty useful.
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May I Pester you?
Sorry, I couldn’t resist, I’ve been pretty busy, and over the past few weeks I’ve been completely overhauling our entire build process. One of things I’ve dont is to completely re-write the modules we use. Previously, we had modules for most every step of the process and they were in seperate repos. Additionally the modules were monolithic script modules (for lack of a better word), all functions were encapsulated in a single psm1 file. We are left with a “single” module that has several nested modules within it. Each module has a set file structure.
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JSON, Strings and Constructors
I don’t know how other folks work, but I tend to work in blocks of time and occasionally those happen to line up with my working hours, but that’s not always the case. The day before I had this idea that it would be really cool if I could re-construct an object from the output Json. For the record, I’m talking about the build automation stuff I’ve been working on. In the last post I talked about how instead of working against the data I decided to embrace it and leverage DataSets and DataTables. This gave me the ability to easily cast a DataRow as a given cloud resource and have access to the methods and properties of the object as defined in the Schema.
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DataTables, Nulls, Strings, Ints and Casting
I’ve been very focused on my work lately, and it’s been gratifying. I’ve learned a great deal in the past few weeks. So let’s recap, I’m working on a solution enabling you to deploy resources into any cloud. At work, this revolves around using terraform, but for the work I do off the clock, I’m hoping to be able to target platform-specific templating languages. The solution at work leverages an Excel Spreadsheet to gather inputs; this is genuinely a non-optimal solution, but, at the time, it’s what everyone decided was the correct choice.
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WTF Write-Verbose
So I’ve been working on some really fun things at work that tie into some of the projects that I’m personally working on, which I guess is par for the course for me. This past Friday I was struggling with re-writing a PowerShell module to leverage my new C# library. The issue was the output was returning blank data, annd it wasn’t readily apparent. It was only after piping through ConvertTo-Json that I was able to even see the issue at all.