Monthly Archives: July 2012

PowerShell: Updating an Azure Service Display Name

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If you’re like me, you probably like clarity, consistency, and conciseness. Given that, I like to ensure that names of hosted services in Windows Azure are named appropriately. Sometimes developers will give a service a quick name that they understand, but may not relay enough information to other team members, at a glance, as to what that service does.

Thankfully, this is easily rectified using a simple PowerShell command. Assuming that you have already configured your Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets according to my recent “Introduction to Azure PowerShell Module” article, you can simply run the following command to update the Label (aka. “friendly name”) of a Windows Azure hosted service.

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# Select the Windows Azure subscription that we are working with (must be configured using Set-AzureSubscription)
Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName Development;
# Set the new friendly name (label) for the service
Set-AzureService -ServiceName MyService -Label "This is my new service label";

If you want to take it one step further, you can build a .NET [HashTable] of key-value mappings that link service names to their respective labels. Then, once you’ve got the mapping, you can simply iterate over it and call Set-AzureService for each entry. This method is a lot more flexible and efficient with writing code :)

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# Select the Windows Azure subscription
Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName development;

# Build a HashTable of service names and labels
$ServiceList = @{
    'Service1' = 'My First Service';
    'Service2' = 'My Second Service';
    'Service3' = 'My Third Service';
};

# For each service entry in the HashTable, update the Label field
foreach ($Service in $ServiceList.Keys) {
        Set-AzureService -ServiceName $Service -Label $ServiceList[$Service];
};

Pretty easy, isn’t it?

“Why go through all that effort? I’ll just do it through the UI.”

Did I happen to mention that the Windows Azure Silverlight user interface (UI) doesn’t even allow you to change the label / friendly name of a hosted service once it has been created? Yes, it’s true (as far as I know). The only option to re-label an Azure hosted service through the management UI, once it has already been defined, is to delete the existing service definition, and recreate it. That doesn’t sound like a viable option in a production environment now, does it? :)

Until next time … enjoy scripting ALL the things in PowerShell!

PowerShell: Embed binary data in your script

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When writing automation scripts or modules, you might find that you frequently reference external binary data.

“Binary data? Well, that accounts for all data!” you might say.

Yes, that’s true. But I’m talking about binary data as opposed to files containing simple ASCII or UTF-8 data. Maybe there’s some better terminology to describe that, but hey it works for now. Binary data could include things such as:

  • Word documents
  • Executable (Portable Executable format)
  • Code libraries (DLLs)
  • Registry files
  • etc.

In the case of executables, oftentimes they provide useful functionality that would take many lines of PowerShell code to replicate. Some developers, for better or for worse, elect to use these utilities instead of going through the effort of writing the necessary code to handle the function natively in PowerShell. This creates an additional dependency when porting the PowerShell code, as the author must be sure to include the utility with their code, or otherwise ensure (via documentation, for example) that the target user will already have it available.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to depend on the user having some executable pre-installed, just to get your script to work, though? Unfortunately the little topic of “software licensing” can sometimes prevent redistribution of software that you are not given explicit permission to copy, however there are also many cases where this is allowed (eg. open-source projects). The work-around in cases where redistribution is not allowed, is to either direct the user where to download the software from, or automate it for them.
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PowerShell: Tracert or Trace-Route?

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UPDATE (2012-07-27): Justin Dearing (@zippy1981) sent me an updated version of the script, which improves on the following:

* Has some comment-based help
* Parameter checking

Grab it here: Invoke-TraceRoute.ps1

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Any network or systems administrator is familiar with the good old tracert.exe utility that’s been included outof-the-box in Windows for years now. Tracert allows you to identify each “hop” (typically a router) between two IP endpoints on a network. Since this utility was developed long before PowerShell existed, and has been time-tested, it hasn’t been implemented yet as a PowerShell cmdlet. That being said, PowerShell folks often do not enjoy reliance on external dependencies, and prefer the flexibility of an API that can provide only the information that they want or need. To that end, I have developed a Trace-Route PowerShell advanced function (cmdlet) that emulates a limited set of functionality offered by tracert.exe.
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Forcibly installing the Android USB driver in Windows 7

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If you are an Android mobile device user, with a tablet or phone, you may at some point desire to connect it to your Windows 7 computer over USB. Generally we do this so that we can use the debug interface with software utilities such as ADB.exe (Android Debug Bridge), which is included with the Google Android SDK.

Upon first connecting your Android device to your Windows 7 system, you might realize that there is no device driver available out-of-the-box to allow the debug interface to work properly. When you open Device Manager (devmgmt.msc) or Computer Management (compmgmt.msc) – which contains the Device Manager MMC snap-in – you might notice a generic icon representing an “Android Device” under the “Other Devices” category. Basically, this means that Windows 7 recognizes the presence of the device, but doesn’t know how to “talk” to it. To get Windows to talk to our Android device, we must install the Google USB driver.
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