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Posts for year 2018, total posts 7
All Posts for 2018
Quickie - Join video files with PowerShell and FFMPEG

While I'm working on some longer posts, I thought I'd share a quick snippet I came up with this weekend as I was backing up a number of old DVDs of family movies. FFMPeg has the awesome ability to join a number of video files together for you, but the syntax can be kind of strange. Once I learned the syntax, I sought to make sure I never had to do it again, and created this cmdlet. Continue Reading...
Excursion: Model View Controller Programming - Part I

Well, it’s been a minute, hasn’t it? This 🦊 needed a break after speaking at MMS and PSChatt! (both awesome events! If you’re shopping for a big conference, I can’t recommend #MMSMOA enough! And early bird pricing is open now!).
Since then at work I’ve had to dive deep and learn a whole new skill set.
Fortunately, I had a scuba tank and now that I’m back up for air, I’d love to share a bit of what I learned.
Continue Reading...Faster: ConfigMgr Collection Manipulation Speed Test

Recently at work, we had a task come up which saw us needing to move tens of thousands of devices between collections in CM. We decided to run some tests to find the fastest way! We compared a lot of options, from using old CM cmdlets to new preview cmdlet versions and even making our own direct WMI Manipulation cmdlets. Finally, we tried just directly inserting them into collections via direct Collection manipulation in SQL which is totally unsupported. Which method one the day? Resad to find out! Continue Reading...
ClientFaux - the fastest way to fill ConfigMgr with Clients

Recently at work, we were debating the best way to handle mass collection moves in ConfigMgr. We’re talking moving 10,000 or more SCCM devices a day into Configuration Manager collections.
To find out, I installed CM in my beastly Altaro VM Testlab (the build of which we covered here), and then wondered…
how the heck will I get enough clients in CM to test in the first place?
Methods we could use to populate CM with Clients
Continue Reading...Hard to test cases in Pester

Recently at work I have finally seen the light and begun adding Pester tests to my modules. Why is this a recent thing, you may ask? After all, I was at PowerShell Summit and heard the good word about it from Dave Wyatt himself way back in 2015, I’ve had years to start doing this.
Honestly, I didn’t get it…
To tell the truth, I didn’t understand the purpose of Pester. I always thought ‘Why do I need to test my code? I know it works if it accomplishes the job it’s supposed to do’.
For instance, I understood that Pester was a part of test-driven development, a paradigm in which you start by writing tests before you write any code. You’d write a ‘It should make a box’ test and wire it up before you actually wrote the New-Box
 function. But I was only looking at the outside of my code, or where it integrates into the environment. In truth, all of the tests I wrote earlier on were actually integration tests.
See, Pester is a Unit Driven Test Framework. It’s meant to test the internal logic of your code, so that you can develop with certainty that new features to your function don’t break your cmdlet.
Continue Reading...