Needing to run SQL Scripts can be a day to day task for System Administration and DevOps. If you have dozens of SQL Scripts to run this can quickly become a tedious job. Automating this with a Powershell script is an obvious solution. But running SQL Scripts in Powershell is not as easy as it...

Powershell One Liner – Easy Directory Zipping For me one of most common tasks in Powershell is zipping or extracting files. Whether you’re backing up a few config files before pushing an updated version, or unzipping gigs of log files, dealing with zip files is an ever present task. In the early days of Powershell...

Octopus Deploy 2.0 Review One of the tools that I got involved with this year was Octopus Deploy. Initially, I had my doubts about the product, but I quickly developed a respect for it. A few reasons I like Octopus, it simplifies the whole code deployment process, you can have migrations running in less than...

Modern Screen Scraping With HtmlAgilityPack In the early days of the Internet, before web services were as common as Starbucks, one of the few ways to pull data from other systems was through screen scraping web pages. I helped with at least one of these apps to scrape stock prices from Yahoo. To say it...