Powershell – A Software Engineer's Logbook

Using the Azure Metadata Service for Virtual Machines

Posted on November 17, 2022November 17, 2022 by Pete

I keep losing the details for the metadata service, so I’m posting them here so I have a reference! The link for the documentation is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/instance-metadata-service . The Azure Metadata Service…

Authoring Azure ARM Templates

Posted on December 1, 2019December 1, 2019 by Pete

I found myself recently working on ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates using Visual Studio 2019 and it was slow going looking up samples, cross referencing properties, etc. This was taking a lot…

Creating and Deleting VSTS Team Projects with Powershell

Posted on September 9, 2018September 17, 2018 by Pete

I was searching and searching and couldn’t find any good documentation on how to create & delete VSTS Projects with PowerShell – so I figured I would write some myself! There’s some…

How to easily switch versions of Azure PowerShell

Posted on July 15, 2018February 1, 2019 by Pete

UPDATED 2.1.2019 to handle the new Az Azure Powershell module! Recently I’ve been creating some scripts using Azure PowerShell (like this one for DevTest Labs documented here), Azure PowerShell support moves forward…

Improving Logs in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) with special ‘tags’

Posted on June 22, 2018July 3, 2018 by Pete

I’ve been doing a lot with Azure Functions, Storage and DevTest Labs recently and leverage VSTS Build and Release to act as an ‘orchestration engine’ to automate Azure. It’s easy to have…

How to Create a Monster Build Agent in Azure for Cheap!

Posted on August 14, 2016June 23, 2018 by Pete

I recently created a VSTS Build and Release steps for my project but ran into an issue using the Hosted Build Agents… During Release I was doing several Azure operations in a…

Figure out the Parameters! Calling Azure REST APIs via Powershell Commandlets

Posted on July 10, 2016June 23, 2018 by Pete

In this post we’ll walk through the process on determining the needed parameters for the Azure Powershell Commandlet wrappers for the Azure REST APIs. It’s sometimes tricky! This is especially helpful if…

Calling Azure Rest APIs from VSTS Build/Release Tasks

Posted on July 7, 2016June 23, 2018 by Pete

I recently learned that VSTS Build & Release tasks have a built-in way to leverage Azure Powershell – cool! I needed to automate a bunch of steps in Azure and already have…