Blog upgraded from Subtext 2.1 to Subtext 2.5

No problems so far and I really like the new dashboard. Good job guys!

Generic retry logic in PowerShell

I spent recently a bit of time writing PowerShell scripts that deploy a system that I’m working on both locally and to QA. Basically, you get the latest code from TFS, run single PowerShell script and press F5 :). Why? Have a look at The Joel Test.
Anyway, while writing those scripts I needed to implement a basic retry logic in multiple places. It turned out that PowerShell supports closures and that you can pass any part of the script to a function as an argument. Having all of that at my disposal made my task very easy:

function Execute-Command($Command, $CommandName) {
    $currentRetry = 0;
    $success = $false;
    do {
        try 
        { 
            & $Command;
            $success = $true;
            Log-Debug "Successfully executed [$CommandName] command. Number of entries: $currentRetry";
        } 
        catch [System.Exception] 
        {
            $message = 'Exception occurred while trying to execute [$CommandName] command:' + $_.Exception.ToString();
            Log-Error $message;
            if ($currentRetry -gt 5) {
                $message = "Can not execute [$CommandName] command. The error: " + $_.Exception.ToString();
                throw $message;
            } else {
                Log-Debug "Sleeping before $currentRetry retry of [$CommandName] command";
                Start-Sleep -s 1;
            }
            $currentRetry = $currentRetry + 1;
        }
    } while (!$success);
}

And this is how you can use it:

$command = { Get-ChildItem $Folder -Recurse | Remove-Item -Recurse -Force};  
$commandName = "Delete content of [$Folder]";  
Execute-Command -Command $command -CommandName $commandName;

CloudCamp is coming again to Sydney!

This time you need to take half a day off to attend it but I believe it’s well worth your time and I really enjoyed the previous camp.