At the May 26, 2011 Boston Azure User Group meeting, Joel Bennett – a Microsoft PowerShell MVP from the Rochester, NY area – spoke about PowerShell basics, then got into a bunch of useful ways PowerShell can be applied to Windows Azure. We had around 25 people at the event.
[Update 23-June-2011: Joel Bennett posted his slide deck from the talk.]
[Update 05-July-2011: Added another handy link to post from Patrick Butler called Developing and Debugging Azure Management API CmdLets.]
Some of the pointers:
- Go get the PowerShell Community Extensions (from codeplex)
- You can use the PS command line to CD into folders/directories, look at files, etc. — but you can also look at the Registry or your Certificate Store as if they were directories!
- There are no plural nouns in PS (e.g., get-provider, not get-providers)
- Learn these commands first: Get-Command, Get-Help, Get-Member, Select-Object, Where-Object, Format-Table, … others you can learn later
- Somebody needs to write a PowerShell Provider for Azure Storage
- Joel created an open-shell WPF-ish PowerShell shell called POSH
Try some commands:
- dir | get-objec
- dir | fl * —formats as lis
- get-verb | fw -col
- get-verb | fw -col 6 -groupby Group
- Get-ExecutionPolicy
- dir | where { $_.PSIsContainer } — where $_ is “the thing over there (directory)”
- dir | select CreationTime, Name | gm
- dir | select * —will look different than command above
- $global:foo = “some value”
- cd c:\windows\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0… see Help.format.ps1xml controls the default output formatting properties for object types not already known by PowerShell – can have property names, even script blocks in it – very powerful
- # is single-line comment char; <# … #> for multi-line comments
- You can create aliases for scripts
- Powershell is an interpreted scripting language
- Can access WinForms, WPF, lots of stuff.. though not Threading
Three ways to manage Azure from PowerShell
- Remoting
- WASM (Windows Azure Services Management commandlets) – superceded by http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/ – developed by Development Evangelist group (e.g., Vittorio)
- Cerebrata (3rd party, commercial)
Remoting:
- Need to get some goodness in a Startup Script, along with crecentials
- Set OS Family = 2 (so you get Windows Server 2008 R2)
- Need a certificate – can be self-signed
WAP PowerShell:
- 36 Cmdlets
- “the 80% library”
- very good example
Cerebrata Cmdlets
- Requires .NET 4.0 (which is different than baseline support for PS, which is .NET CLR 2.0
- $70
- 114 Cmdlets
- Cerebrata
- gcm –mo cerebrata | gr0up Noun | sort
Snap-ins need to be in the GAC – so put WAP PowerShell stuff where you want to keep them, since that’s where they’ll be built — or build the file in Visual Studio
- Add-Module is for SNAPINS
- IPMO is for ImportModule for Modules
- ipmo AzurePlatform
- gcm –mo AzurePlatform
PowerShell has something called “splatting”
- Starting with a hashtable… put in the parms you’ll need
- variables start with $
- retrieving (splatting) starts with @
Both cerebrata and WAP are snap-ins
WHAT FOLLOWS… are somewhat random notes I captured…
Get-Certificate $azure | Get-HostedCertificateStore
Your personal profile for PowerShell lives in c:\Users\YOURNAME\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\AzurePlatform as Startup.ps1 (?)
Two kinds of errors in PowerShell: 1. Terminating Errors (exceptions, can be “trapped” or use try/catch as of PS2) and 2. Non-Terminating Errors which are harder to deal with
$? ==> did the last command succeed
dir doesnotexist –ev er –ea “”
$er[0].categoryinfo
“Don’t Produce Snap-ins!” Here’s why: to figure out what is in there (get-command –Module
Get-Module –ListAvailable
– run the above on AZure and see “NetworkLoadBalancingCl…” – is this Azure relate
OTHER INTERESTING POWERSHELL/AZURE LINKS
- http://poshcode.org/
- http://pscx.codeplex.com
- http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic
- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2011/06/30/developing-and-debugging-azure-management-api-cmdlets.aspx
Coding Out Loud 
