Tagged articles - PowerShell

When using Azure DevOps Pipelines or Releases, it is pretty easy to move informations from the pipeline/release into the target artifact package or folder on the target environment. What can be tricky if you need to dictate your pipeline/release based on the value from your code base or maybe the environment to which you are deploying to. As a simple example I set the version attribute in in my .csproj file which I will use to tell UseDotNet task in my build pipeline which SDK to use to perform .NET Core project build. ...read more

Creating a copy of an existing Virtual Machine on Azure is not really that much straight forward as you might think. The proper way as described in the documentation is to "generalize" Virtual Machine which puts it into a state where it can be used as a template for creating new Virtual Machines. Unfortunately this way of creating a clone of VM on Azure makes the source VM inaccessible...read more

If you are using Visual Studio 2017 as your main IDE, than you are probably familiar and used at least once NuGet package manager console. You may know or maybe not, but NuGet Package Manager relies on PowerShell script and Package Manager Console is basically hosted PowerShell command line inside Visual Studio. This means, apart from NuGet commands, you can also execute PowerShell commands. ...read more

Starting from January 2018, Microsft has made PowerShell Core 6, a cross-platform tool available not only to Windows users which was the case so far with previous versions, but to Linux and Mac users as well. Since it was tool for Windows only, it had it's own ways for remoting using WinRM unlike Linux operating systems which primarily rely on SSH. Windows is great for editing and development, I find it really comfortable to work on with so many tools and platform available...read more

In .NET framework, having separate configuration is possible by having different web.config or app.config file transformations since in .NET framework configuration is stored in XML format. You can check more on this in article Separate configuration files per build config in Visual Studio IDE...read more

Unlike Entity Framework 6, EF Core and whole .NET Core relies on dependency injection. For example, configuration is expected to be injected from the calling assembly instead of being available at any time. This is one of the reasons Migrations in Code First approach do not work out of the box for EF Core...read more

Starting from IIS 7.0 Microsoft introduced IP and Domain restrictions feature as a part of IIS setup. However, if you do not have this feature installed on your IIS you can easily install it through windows features adding steps which are pretty much same for each Windows version (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/configuration/system.webserver/security/ipsecurity/add) or simply by using WebPlatform Installer. Just run WebPlatform Installer and search for IP and Domain restrictions in search box...read more

WebP is an image format introduced by Google in 2010. It uses specific technique to compress image and reduce size significantly while not changing the image quality on the larger scale...read more

Recently I wrote an article about optimizing PNG images for intenrent using pngcrush and PowerShell. I actually used this method to optimize all PNG images on my website. Although I mostly use PNG images, there are still some JPEG images I use on the pages and this was not included in optimization with PNGCRUSH utility since it is specialized for PNG...read more

Imagine a case where you have an existing website which is running for the past few years. You decided to run a Google PageSpeed insights on couple of pages and you realized that your PNG images on the pages are not optimized for Internet. Now this can be solved thanks to a lot of online PNG image optimizers, but considering the number of the files you might have over the years of website running it can be matter of days, even maybe weeks to optimize all of them. This was my case and I could not afford myself that much time. ...read more

Minification of Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) and Java Script (JS) should be on a TODO list for every web application. The minification of CSS and JS can be easily one on the runtime with ASP.NET bundling which is build in in ASP.NET framework, but in case of distributing your resource files over CDN you cannot use the runtime minification. You physical files need to be minified...read more

When deploying application to specific location it is often required to deploy only few files and not the whole deployment package. For example, if you changed only single static image file in your ASP.NET WebApplication, there is no reason to overwrite bin folder content and cause WebApplication on IIS to restart. ...read more

Sending email after and even before a long running PowerShell script is a logical thing to do to notify users which are responsible for taking actions for the specific operation. PowerShell starting from version 3.0 has build in cmdlet Send-MailMessage for sending emails. ...read more

Since Google announced HTTPS as ranking signal most of the websites now days are switching to secured communication via SSL certificates. Even I switched my website to HTTPS secured connection to follow up with this new trend. Using certificate on the website is related to domain binding, but even before we setup the domain binding for the website, we need to import the certificate to IIS...read more

Finding out installed .NET Framework version on the host Windows OS is not an everyday job, but when it comes to deployments of the .NET application it is needed to check if the host supports targeting .NET Framework version. Starting from .NET Framework 4.5, Microsoft is storing .NET Framework version as a key in registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v4\Full\Release ...read more