Joining strings in pipeline

Mario Majcica February 22, 2018 2 Comments

In PowerShell, I’ve been joining string arrays for quite some time with the join operator which concatenates a set of strings into a single string. Today however, I found myself in need to join strings that are coming from the pipeline, without previously saving the result into a variable. Guess what, there is nothing ready, out of the box, that will do the trick.
In case you would like to join the strings with new line character as a delimiter (or with no delimiter at all), you can always use Out-String cmdlet, eventually with it’s -NoNewline parameter. However, as far as I know, there are no cmdlets available that will perform this simple operation.

This pushed me to write a simple one that should do the trick.

function Join-String
{
    [CmdletBinding()]
    param
    (
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true, ValueFromPipeline = $true)][string]$String,
        [Parameter(Position = 1)][string]$Delimiter = ""
    )
    BEGIN {$items = @() }
    PROCESS { $items += $String }
    END { return ($items -join $Delimiter) }
}

Invoking this cmdlet is quite trivial, however, for completeness here is an example.

$commaSepareted = @("one","two","three") | Join-String ","

That’s it folks!

Is there a more elegant or out of the box way to achieve the same?

Available modules for TFS 2015 build tasks

Mario Majcica November 14, 2015 6 Comments

It is not yet well documented but if you are writing a custom build task for your TFS 2015 build system, you get at your disposition some of the modules that are made available by your VsoWorker.
As I couldn’t find a list of available modules and cmdlets they expose, I decided to dig into them and see what is there. I also wanted to check if with the Update 1 (and the new version of the build agent) there will be more of them.
I wrote a handy task that will list all of the available cmdlets for all of the modules shipped by the agent worker. Following are my results.

With TFS 2015 the agent version delivered is 1.83.2. It offers the following modules:

• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Common.dll
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Deployment.Azure.psm1
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Deployment.Chef.psm1
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.DevTestLabs.dll
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.DTA.dll
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Internal.dll
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.TestResults.dll

I will now list of all importable functions and cmdlets in those modules.

• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Common.dll
• Add-TaskIssue
• Complete-Task
• Find-Files
• Get-LocalizedString
• Set-TaskProgress
• Set-TaskVariable
• Write-TaskDetail
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Deployment.Azure.psm1
• Get-AzureCmdletsVersion
• Get-AzureModuleLocation
• Get-AzureVersionComparison
• Get-RequiresEnvironmentParameter
• Get-SelectNotRequiringDefault
• Import-AzurePowerShellModule
• Initialize-AzurePowerShellSupport
• Initialize-AzureSubscription
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Deployment.Chef.psm1
• Get-DetailedRunHistory
• Get-PathToNewtonsoftBinary
• Get-ShouldWaitForNodeRuns
• Get-TemporaryDirectoryForChef
• Initialize-ChefRepo
• Invoke-GenericMethod
• Invoke-Knife
• Invoke-WithRetry
• Wait-ForChefNodeRunsToComplete
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.DevTestLabs.dll
• Complete-EnvironmentOperation
• Complete-EnvironmentResourceOperation
• Complete-ResourceOperation
• Copy-FilesToAzureBlob
• Copy-FilesToRemote
• Copy-FilesToTargetMachine
• Copy-ToAzureMachines
• Get-Environment
• Get-EnvironmentProperty
• Get-EnvironmentResources
• Get-ProviderData
• Invoke-BlockEnvironment
• Invoke-EnvironmentOperation
• Invoke-PsOnRemote
• Invoke-ResourceOperation
• Invoke-UnblockEnvironment
• New-OperationLog
• Register-Environment
• Register-EnvironmentDefinition
• Register-Provider
• Register-ProviderData
• Remove-Environment
• Remove-EnvironmentResources
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.DTA.dll
• Invoke-DeployTestAgent
• Invoke-RunDistributedTests
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Internal.dll
• Add-BuildArtifactLink
• Add-BuildAttachment
• Convert-String
• Copy-BuildArtifact
• Get-JavaDevelopmentKitPath
• Get-MSBuildLocation
• Get-ServiceEndpoint
• Get-TaskVariable
• Get-ToolPath
• Get-VisualStudioPath
• Get-VssConnection
• Get-X509Certificate
• Invoke-Ant
• Invoke-BatchScript
• Invoke-IndexSources
• Invoke-Maven
• Invoke-MSBuild
• Invoke-PublishSymbols
• Invoke-Tool
• Invoke-VSTest
• Publish-BuildArtifact
• Register-XamarinLicense
• Unregister-XamarinLicense
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.TestResults.dll
• Invoke-ResultPublisher
• Publish-TestResults

The Update 1 RC1 for TFS increased the agent to the version 1.89.0 and the RC2 incremented it to version 1.89.1. As of the time I’m writing this blog post, the RC2 is the latest version available, I’ll list and show the differences with a plain TFS 2015 build agent.

Three new modules are added:

• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.CodeCoverage
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Deployment.Internal
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Deployment.RemoteDeployment

Following the list of all importable functions and cmdlets in the those modules.

• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.CodeCoverage
• Enable-CodeCoverage
• Publish-CodeCoverage
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Deployment.Internal
• Get-OperationLogs
• Get-ResourceCredentials
• Get-ResourceFQDNTagKey
• Get-ResourceHttpsTagKey
• Get-ResourceHttpTagKey
• Get-ResourceOperationLogs
• Get-SkipCACheckTagKey
• Get-SqlPackageCommandArguments
• Import-DevtestLabsCommomDll
• Write-ResponseLogs
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Deployment.RemoteDeployment
• Invoke-RemoteDeployment

Furthermore some cmdlets are added to the existing modules:

• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Deployment.Azure.psm1
• Set-CurrentAzureRMSubscription
• Set-CurrentAzureSubscription
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.DevTestLabs.dll
• Get-ExternalIpAddress
• Get-ParsedSessionVariables
• Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Internal.dll
• Get-IndexedSourceFilePaths
• Get-TfsClientCredentials

It also seems that in the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Internal.dll, Invoke-IndexSources cmdlet is not available any more.

You can reference these modules from your custom Build tasks by calling a standard import module cmdlet.

import-module "Microsoft.TeamFoundation.DistributedTask.Task.Common"

If you are interested about the agent version, you can check it by executing the vsoagent on your build server, with the following parameter:

VsoAgent.exe /version

As soon as an RTM version of the Update 1 becomes available, I’ll update this post.

In case you are interested in a short description of these functions, you can their source code for further info