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When importing a file full of data into a test system, I discovered that the CSV library I was using to do all the work was stopping when it reached a blank line. That makes sense, it thinks the data has ended. On inspection, I found quite a lot of blank lines, so there was […]
Yesterday I had to look at a list of stuff on a third-party website and match it up to a list of stuff we control. It took quite a bit of time and some Excel shenanigans to complete the task and as I know it’s going to crop up again, I decided to employ PowerShell […]
It seems like everyone has a high-quality, expensive, programmable deck on their desk these days. Elgato’s Stream Deck, with it’s glowing LCD buttons, comes in flavours that cost between £100 and £200 (depending on how many buttons you want). It’s beautiful bit of kit that glows its way into the hearts of tech geeks everywhere. […]
Having put together some individual scripts that ripped data out of an Excel spreadsheet, I decided to co-ordinate them with a master PowerShell script that would contain my variables and call out to neat little scripts to do work. PowerShell gets tricky to read when it gets big, so I prefer to have a couple […]
Having opened up the same Excel spreadsheet to copy out a list of domain names into a text file for my test automation tools to consume for the third time, I wrote a PowerShell script to do it for me. Yes, it’s the same spreadsheet I mentioned before, it is full of interesting data and […]
Having opened up the same Excel spreadsheet to save the data as a CSV for the third time, I wrote a PowerShell script to do it for me. Simply set the source and destination files and the script takes care of the rest. & { $sourceFile = “C:\Temp\data.xlsx” $outFile = “C:\Temp\data.csv” $excelApplication = New-Object -ComObject […]
I needed to know how many pictures were being sent in a collection of XML documents, so I wrote a PowerShell script to count the number of picture elements. The element I’m looking for is in the $element_xpath variable. The example below is any picture element, anywhere in the document. You could limit this by […]
In the days of XAML Builds in TFS, the build would rather handily update the work item with the appropriate “Integration Build” value… so you knew which release would include your fix. Happy days. Along came vNext builds in TFS / Visual Studio Online / Visual Studio Team Services, which solved all of the pain […]
I have a DbUp console application that needed to be executed with PowerShell (in my case via Octopus Deploy – but this works in any case), but I wanted to be able to get the result when executing it. By default, running the “Database.exe” from PowerShell will open a new console window for the application […]
This is not our preferred method of deployment, but we have some batch-file based deployments still in active use (most of our deployments are executed via Octopus Deploy, but some of the concepts below are re-usable there too). One of the tasks we perform during a deployment is a database backup prior to schema changes. […]