PowerShell Commands

The origins of PowerShell lie in the Monad project which you can learn about here: https://www.jsnover.com/Docs/MonadManifesto.pdf

PowerShell Base CmdLets and associated Pipeline parsing CmdLets  provide powerful Windows administration tools

These can be used on-the-fly to glean and share information about a problem or the state of your machine(s) and network or they can be crafted into useful scripts that run on a schedule to report on the status of applications and services, run backup and ETL tasks as well as myriad other (often critical) scheduled jobs that happen routinely behind the scenes to keep IT operations organized and running.

You may for instance, want to have a script run every few hours that gathers statistics about throughput and storage and then alert admin users if a certain threshold is exceeded. Or, in Azure, you may want to utilize a scripted template (like Azure ARM and associated CLI commands) to configure new Azure resources and their environments.

Useful cmdlets:

#check security level
Get-ExecutionPolicy

#elevate security access level
Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

#get information on any service
Get-Service -Name PhoneSvc

#get the same log info seen in eventvwr
Get-EventLog -Log "Application" 

#get process information
Get-Process -ComputerName MYCOMPUTER

#stop process like cmd.exe kill
Stop-Process -Name “notepad”

#get drive information of the drives connected to the current PS session
Get-PSDrive 

#get information on any powershell cmdlt, function or module
Get-Help -Name Streaming

#get all the installed commands
Get-Command

#connect to your azure account with the "az" azure cmdlt
Connect-AzureRmAccount

#upload blob content to storage
Set-AzStorageBlobContent -File "D:\_TestImages\Image002.png" `
  -Container $containerName `
  -Blob "Image002.png" `
  -Context $ctx
  -StandardBlobTier Cool

#download blob content from storage
Get-AzStorageBlobContent -Blob "Image002.png" `
  -Container $containerName `
  -Destination "D:\_TestImages\Downloads\" `
  -Context $ctx

#stop a sql server instance
Stop-SqlInstance -ServerInstance MSSQL01

#clear screen
Clear-Host

#ping
Test-NetConnection

#telnet
Test-NetConnection -Port

#tracert
Test-NetConnection -TraceRoute

#ipconfig
Get-NetIPAddress

#nslookup
Resolve-DnsName -Name "Hostname"

#netstat
Get-NetTCPConnection

#flushdns
Clear-DnsClientCache

#ip release/renew
Invoke-Command -ComputerName -ScriptBlock {ipconfig /release}
Invoke-Command -ComputerName -ScriptBlock {ipconfig /renew}

#disable/enable network card
Invoke-Command -ComputerName -ScriptBlock {ipconfig /release}
Invoke-Command -ComputerName -ScriptBlock {ipconfig /renew}

Additionally, it is often useful to implement piping of command output, especially in CI/CD toolchain scripting where scripts feed their output (which become the next script's argument(s)) to the next script in the chain.

For example: 

#export a list to .csv file
Get-Service | Export-CSV c:\20200912_ServiceSnapshot.csv

#be more selective with Select-Object module and pipe that to the csv
Get-Service | Select-Object Name, Status | Export-CSV c:\20200912_ServiceStatusSnapshot.csv

#get event information and pipe method (of each log event) info to the console
Get-EventLog -log system | gm -MemberType Methods

#get a process and stop it
Get-Process notepad | Stop-Process

#delete all files matching some Regex pattern
Get-ChildItem $Path | Where{$_.Name -Match "someFileName.txt"} | Remove-Item

References:  

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azure/new-azureps-module-az?view=azps-4.6.1

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-powershell-commands-every-windows-admin-should-know

https://ss64.com/ps/get-member.html

NLog for Flexible Application Logging in .NET

As much as I have enjoyed working with log4net in the psat NLog works much more seamlessly for .NET apps (it has good, solid abstractions)

From Nuget Package Manager, you can find and reference NLog and the accompanying NLog.Config which simplifies setup. To configure NLog logging, simply point the required properties (you need at least a logFile variable, a target and a rule to get started) to your desired values in the config file that NLog.Config creates in your project root  (NLog.config):

Configuration:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>  
 <nlog xmlns="http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd"  
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"  
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd NLog.xsd"  
    autoReload="true"  
    throwExceptions="false"  
    internalLogLevel="Off" internalLogFile="c:\temp\nlog-internal.log">  
  <variable name="logFilePath" value="C:\NLog\IDG.log" />  
  <targets>  
   <target name="logfile"  
     xsi:type="File"  
     fileName="${logFilePath}"  
     layout="${longdate}  LEVEL=${level:upperCase=true}: ${message}"  
     keepFileOpen="true" />  
  </targets>  
  <rules>  
   <logger name="*" minlevel="Info" writeTo="logfile" />  
   <logger name="*" minlevel="Warn" writeTo="logFile"/>  
  </rules>  
 </nlog>  

This example uses a log file target in C:\NLog directory; you can utilize a wide variety of logging targets to broadcast app errors

Source Code:

 using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;  
 using NLog;  
 namespace ExtRSTests  
 {  
   [TestClass]  
   public class NLogTests  
   {  
     private static Logger logger = LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger();  
     [TestMethod]  
     public void TestLoggerToFile()  
     {  
       logger.Warn("Something in the app happened that may indicate trouble ahead....");  
       logger.Error("Uh-oh. Something broke.");  
     }  
   }  
 }  

With the logging levels, log formatting (timestamps) and abundant integration options, NLog is a complete logging solution

With NLogger you can implement logging for an array of targets including file, email, database and 3rd party integrations (ie. send message to Slack channel if logger generates any "Error" or "Fatal" level log message).


Reference: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3144535/how-to-work-with-nlog-in-net.html