When I am creating error messages in PowerShell scripts, I like to use common .Net exceptions. Most of the time when I am searching for a list of exceptions to use, I end up using the All .Net Exceptions list generated by Mike Vallotton. I thought it was a clever idea so I went ahead and generated an updated list of my own.

I did this by parsing all the .Net 4.6.1 Namespace xml files on my system. All of the content below is auto generated and comes from Microsoft’s files that are used for IntelliSense. I hope you find this list of .Net Exceptions as useful as I do.

I did a lot more this month than I expected. Here is a breakdown of all the posts and other Powershell projects that I worked on.

Personal/Community efforts

These are the projects and idea that I do on my own time for the community. Most of my personal projects are published on this blog or as a contribution on GitHub.

We were having a conversation recently at work about server naming conventions and it reminded of an article where the author was using a mnemonic word list to name servers. After a little digging, I was able to track it down.

Saving data to files is a very common task when working with PowerShell. There may be more options than you realize. Let’s start with the basics and work into the more advanced options.

Pester has a interesting secret feature that we need to talk about. It supports Gherkin-style feature specifications. I had no idea this was even a thing until I was looking at one of Joel Bennett’s modules and saw something I had not seen before.

This feature allows you to define your features and specifications in a simple business readable syntax. Then you crate a validation script that gets executed with that specification. It will give you pass/fail results on each item like Pester. I think this is awesome and more people need to know about it. I am not exactly sure when this feature was introduced, so you may need to update Pester to get it.

When I was working on my DSL, I found that I had to be more creative with my advanced function implementations than I do with normal advanced functions. When it comes to writing a script CmdLet, there are lots of community standards and expected behaviors already defined.

When creating a DSL, you may be bending a lot of those best practices to create the best user experience. When optimizing for the user, you may find yourself collecting and processing data using different technique.

I am not sure how many times I have written a script to generate server lists for Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan). I find that it is a very easy script to write many different ways. Writing a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) to generate RDCMan files may not be the best solution for this problem, but generating RDCMan files is a good project for a first DSL.

I always considered myself a Powershell purist. A DSL (Domain-Specific Language) written in Powershell abuses all the rules that I have grown to embrace. I recently found myself building a module that was implemented as a DSL and I really like how it turned out. Not only that, but I also had fun writing it.

I was in the Powershell Slack channel and Joel Bennett mentioned inheriting from System.Management.Automation.ValidateArgumentsAttribute to create a custom validator. This builds directly on my last post because you are creating a custom attribute to do this.

Every once and a while I stumble onto something in Powershell that I find interesting and I can’t help but dive deep into it. I saw a tweet by Brandon Olin recently that showed that you can create your own custom attributes in Powershell.

Custom attributes work on #PowerShell class methods. This will be useful. pic.twitter.com/8AeopiWH8T

— Brandon Olin (@devblackops) January 2, 2017

We can have a lot of fun with that.

I just published a new module to the Powershell Gallery. Calling this one Chronometer because it has the ability to track line by line script execution times. It also has the fun side effect of showing your code coverage visually if you run it with pester.

Let’s build some graphs with Powershell and PSGraph.

I love to visualize things. There are just some patterns that are hard to see in tables of data that can jump out to you when it is visualized. Today, I am going to be working with my new module PSGraph.

A fresh start to building a module.

I have not built a module from scratch in a long time. My process has evolved and I have incorporated a lot of ideas into my process. Most of the time, I copy an existing module and just got out all the functions. This has worked because each module grows a little more from the last time I built one.

I also realize that I may have some older ideas baked into my process. I have seen a lot of good work in the community that I have not formally adopted because what I had just worked. It was quick and easy to run with.

I am working on a new module and I want to rethink a lot of the things I have done when setting up a new module. I especially want to incorporate CI/CD (Continious Integration and Continious Delivery) ideas into my pipeline. To help get a fresh perspective on this, I am going to build it based on the work done by Warren Frame (RamblingCookieMonster) and I am going to use his PSDepend project as my reference. He has built quite a few modules for the community. It also helps that he has written many of the modules that I am planning on using and has several great blog posts covering those modules.

There are many ways to use variables in strings. I am calling this variable substitution but I am referring to any time you want to format a string to include values from variables. This is something that comes up a lot that I find myself explaining quite often to new scripters.

I want to take a step back and talk about hashtables. I use these all the time now. I was teaching someone about them after our user group meeting last night and I realized I had the same confusion about them at first that he had. Hashtables are really important in Powershell so it is good to have a solid understanding of them.