Automation

Generate XML with attributes using PowerShell

Today I discovered that generating XML with PowerShell isn’t as straight forward as I had hoped. I started off with a CSV that I had to convert to XML. Fortunately PowerShell is very good when it comes to CSV. It was the parsing of the object to XML-attributes that proved the most challenging part.

Building an updatable Slack message

Slack is fully awesome. At Wehkamp we use it for our internal communication and as a tool for our DevOps. The Slack API allows us to build even more advanced integrations. In this blog I’ll explore how to use the API to create powerful progress indicators by updating a Slack message.

Jump-starting Slack bot projects: bot-zero

To give teams a jump start we’ve created the bot-zero open source project. It solves some setup and development problems. In this blog I’ll show how to get up and running in minutes and I’ll explain some of the choices we’ve made.

Cleaning up the default Hubot Slack installation

If you set up a new Hubot using the Slack Developer Kit for Hubot you’ll get an awesome bot, but with a lot of useless stuff in it. In this blog I’ll outline all the things that can be safely cleaned up. The scripts can run on both Powershell (Windows) and Bash (Linux/Mac).

CI/CD for .Net Core app deployment to Raspberry Pi using Bitbucket

.Net now runs on your Raspberry Pi (awesome!). Tired of xcopying the result to your pi? In this article I’ll explore how to build a CI/CD Bitbucket pipeline that will build and deploy the app to your Raspberry Pi.

Hubot + ES6 + Promises

Lately we’ve been playing around with ChatOps at Wehkamp. We added a Hubot to our Slack channels to automate some operational jobs. It makes work more fun and way easier. As it is hosted in our own infrastructure, it can interact with our micro-services. In this article I explore how to use ES6 and a Promise to implement a call to a simple web-service.

Taming Unit Test logging in Docker pipeline for .NET

The main problem of a CI/CD pipeline – in my opinion – is logging. When it logs too little you don’t know what’s going on, when it logs to much you can’t see the trees to the forest. Having too much logging can seriously impact the effectiveness of your CI/CD pipeline. This script will improve Xunit unit test output.

PowerShell snippet: check if software is installed

Some deployment scripts need to check if certain required software is installed on a Windows Machine. You could check if the file is present at a certain location, but there is a better way to check if software is installed: the uninstall database in the Windows Registry. PowerShell makes it really easy to query the registry!

Draw .Net Core project relations with PowerShell and yUML

Having a diagram of how your C# projects interlink, can be a big help. I’ve created a small PowerShell script that will produce the diagram based on the .csproj files in a directory. It will generate Yuml.me diagrams based on the dependencies!

A small batch file to compile and execute… Java

Entering a javac (compile) and a java (execution) command seems tedious, so I wondered if those could be scripted into a good old .bat file.

I’ve created a file called yall.bat to help with the process. It has been a while since I’ve been playing around with batch files. I’ve seen my father do it… it still looks like a dark – and ancient – art to me.