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Mutex in PowerShell

Lately, I was having problem where I am only allowed to spawn a single process in my PowerShell script. Any concurrent execution of the process will cause deadlock of a particular resource.

The easiest solution to this is by wrapping your process call (a.k.a. critical region) in a Mutex, which utilise the .NET framework

$mutex = new-object -TypeName System.Threading.Mutex -ArgumentList $false, “RandomGlobalMutexName”; $result = $mutex.WaitOne(); #Begin Critical Region Write-Host "Hello World" Sleep 60 #End Critical Region $mutex.ReleaseMutex();

Put this in a file called hellomutex.ps1 and spawn up multiple powershell session and try to run the script simultaneously. You should get sequential write of "Hello World" in different powershell session.

Hope this helps!

#powershell

PowerShell Quickly do Clear Text Password for PSCredential

Sometimes you need to be able to create PSCredential object quickly and use it in PowerShell script, mainly for testing but probably not for real script. You would probably store the actual SecureString in a text file or secure storage if you really need to save PSCredential in production script.

Here is how you would quickly create PSCredential from clear text where the password is P@ssword.

$user = "domain\username" $password = ConvertTo-SecureString P@ssword -AsPlainText -Force $credential = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential($user,$password)

Please note that I don't use double-quote (") in front or at the end of the password as sometimes this is included as the part of password character and it's one of the annoying thing that we might ended up troubleshooting.

If your password has a space in it you can also do it with quote to indicate a string object like this:

$password = "M! P@ssword" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force

Hope this is useful!

#PowerShell

Access TFS Lab Management API by PowerShell

People who has worked with TFS/VS Lab Management probably knows already that there's an API to access Lab Management from C# .NET program. A great example is written by my friend who writes a blog series on understanding this API.

However, you'll find out working with this environment sometimes requires a lot more flexibilities of changing the logic and flow of your automation. PowerShell scripting provides those nice flexibilities.

In this post, I will give you an example of a PowerShell script that loads a couple of TFS SDK Library and inspect a particular status of Environment and its VMs.

# Load Client Assembly [Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"); [Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Lab.Client, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"); # TFS and Lab Connections $tfsCollectionUrl = "http://tfsServer:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection"; $tfsCollection = [Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory]::GetTeamProjectCollection($tfsCollectionUrl); $labService = $tfsCollection.GetService([Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Lab.Client.LabService]); # Random URI for the Environment $labEnv = $labService.GetLabEnvironment("vstfs:///LabManagement/LabEnvironment/584"); Write-Host " " Write-Host "Environment State:" $labEnv.StatusInfo.State Write-Host "Environment Number of VMs:" $labEnv.LabSystems.Count Write-Host " " foreach($labSystem in $labEnv.LabSystems) { Write-Host "VM Name: "$labSystem.Name Write-Host "Hyper-V Host: "$labSystem.ExtendedInfo.HostName Write-Host "Guest OS: "$labSystem.ExtendedInfo.GuestOperatingSystem Write-Host " " }

The two assemblies that I used are Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client and Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Lab.Client. The former is used for establishing connection to the TFS Server and the latter is used for accessing the LabService.

Hopefully this can give you a start if you're interested in accessing or automating your Lab Environments from PowerShell.

#TFS2010 #Lab Management #PowerShell

It begins here...

So, I decided to write. There's a lot of exciting things that I'm currently working on, in particular with Microsoft Technologies: .NET, Team Foundation Server, PowerShell, Hyper-V, Azure, F#, AppFabric.

I have to be honest, I enjoyed wow-ing people around me and sharing cool information and knowledge just makes me happy.

Lately, I've been involved in this massive project to build a private cloud for our development team based on Microsoft's TFS 2010 Lab Management and it was quite challenging because the requirement isn't out of the box experience. I can guarantee you that I'll be writing lots of stuff about my findings about this.

One of my passion is also working with functional language. I used to do a lot of haskell programming back in my Uni days and I'm quite excited with F# given that I'm developing in Microsoft Platform day in day out.

Virtualization and Cloud also excite me. For a developer, there's nothing better to see your application provisioned to the market as fast as possible. So you'll probably see me posting about this :).

Anyway, hope you enjoy my blog!

Jan

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