Tag Archives: testing

London Bot Framework Meetup the Third

Welcome to the Third London BotFramework Meetup! Here's the line up

On Wednesday 22nd November 2017 I had the pleasure of running the third London Bot Framework meetup at the lovely Just Eat office in central London. The offices have been recently upgraded and the new meetup space has a huge 9 screen display a multiple mic speaker system, including a fantastic CatchBox throwable mic for ensuring everyone hears the audience questions

It has been a year since the previous one (whoops) but it was great to see some familiar faces return in the attendees. I had forgotten how much fun it is to emcee an event like this! Maybe next time I’ll be sure to just emcee and not also commit presenting a session too.

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Unit Testing Powershell with Pester

I write a lot of Powershell these days; it’s my go-to language for quick jobs that need to interact with external systems, like an API, a DB, or the file system for example.

Nothing to configure, nothing to deploy, nothing to set up really; just hack a script together and run it. Perfect for one-off little tasks.

I’ve used it for all manner of things in my career so far, most notably for Azure automation back before Azure had decent automation in place. We’re talking pre-Resource Manager environment creation stuff.

I would tie together a suite of separate scripts which would individually:

  • create a Storage account,
  • get the key for the Storage account,
  • create a DB instance,
  • execute a DB initialisation script,
  • create a Service Bus,
  • execute a Service Bus initialisation script,
  • deploy Cloud Services,
  • start/stop/restart those services

Tie that lot together and I could spin up an entire environment easily.

powershell_azure_createdb

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