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. […]
Important Note! These commands for Windows Services work if you run Command Prompt as Administrator. List All Services SC QUERY state=all > “C:\Temp\Services.txt” This will drop a text file (because you’re likely to have more information than your command buffer) into the temp folder for your perusal. Start / Stop a Service Start a service… […]
This will seem like a strange issue, because everything will work perfectly well for a period of time – but then it will all go wrong and you’ll get an error such as: Error messages: The distribution agent failed to create temporary files in ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\COM’ directory. System returned errorcode 5. (Source: MSSQL_REPL, […]
I was attempting to rebuild performance counters on a Windows Server 2012 machine, using the following command in PowerShell (with elevated rights): lodctr /r But kept getting the error: Error: Unable to rebuild performance counter setting from system backup store, error code is 5PS The simple answer… running the same command in an elevated command […]
If you clone a VM that has an existing Octopus Deploy tentacle running, you’ll find that you’ll have a problem with a thumbprint clash. All you need to do is generate a new thumprint using tentacle.exe. You can do this using a command window, or PowerShell… cd “c:\Program Files\Octopus Deploy\Tentacle” .\tentacle.exe new-certificate This command will […]
There are two reasons you might want to add this step to your Octopus Deploy project. The first is to perform a basic check that your newly deployed website or API is working and the second is to warm it up (although there are built-in IIS utilities for this too). I have defined a variable […]
Due to replication needing a few Windows users scattered about the place, I needed to write a PowerShell script to create the users as part of the Octopus Deploy automated deployment. For completeness, I have added some users to this script, but you can use “Sensitive” variables in Octopus Deploy to hide away important information […]