I needed to delete a Glacier vault, which (because it’s not empty) needs the use of an SDK or the CLI. Since I’m using Windows, I figured that I might as well take the opportunity to play with the AWS Tools for PowerShell.

The documentation is for Java, and mentions the PKCS10CertificationRequest class.

I was attempting to convert some Java code that uses Bouncy Castle into the equivalent PowerShell. The Java code was using the PKCS10CertificationRequest class, and I needed to see if there was an equivalent in the .NET libraries:

We had an issue at work last week where a web application was taking a little bit too long to start up, which was causing intermittent failures. We’d like the application to be always-running, so that this doesn’t happen.

How do we find out if there’s a worker process for an application pool? Note that there can be more than one worker process for each application pool. Note also that a worker process can host multiple web applications.

Again, this is more-or-less a direct port from the C# post.

Note: This is a bit long, because I want to take a moment to show some of the problems you might have using PowerShell to call .NET code that’s written in a certain style.

PowerShell has a really cool feature where it’ll coerce a string into an enum value. I’ll demonstrate by exporting a certificate from the Windows certificate store:

This is all just .NET reflection code, converted from C# to PowerShell, but it can be useful…

I recently wrote a series of blog posts on how to use the cryptography libraries from the Legion of the BouncyCastle in C#.

If you use an enum, PowerShell can implicitly convert the value:

Attempting to use Add-Type to load a .NET assembly in PowerShell this afternoon, I got the following error:

Attempting to use Add-Type to load a .NET assembly in PowerShell this afternoon, I got the following error:

The first line finds certificates with the matching subject. The loop goes through those certificates, using .NET class library methods to delete them.

Some programs write their output in different colours. If they’re badly-behaved and don’t reset the colours when they’ve finished, your PowerShell console might be left with the wrong background or foreground colours.

I’ve been using PowerShell as a better Command Prompt for a while now. Increasingly, however, it’s one of the first tools I reach for when I come across a problem, rather than being an afterthought.

There’s probably a better way to do this, but here’s what I came up with in a couple of minutes…