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This post is a part of a series of posts on Azure Powershell:

Azure Tip 10: Advanced Powershell Tricks (Web Services, StopWatch, Remoting, COM Interop)
Azure Tip 9: More Azure Powershell (pipes, filters, output formatting, exporting)
Azure Tip 8: Getting Started with Azure Powershell

Calling WebServices with Powershell

#Calling a REST WebService
#Use the google maps api to calculate the distance between 2 cities:

PS C:> $uri = 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/directions/json'
PS C:> $query = '?mode=driving&origin=One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, United States&destination=Sägereistrasse 29, 8152 Opfikon, Switzerland'
PS C:> $response = Invoke-RestMethod $uri$query

#The variable $response contains a json object

PS C:> $response.routes[0].legs[0].distance
text    value
----    -----
35.1 km 35141

PS C:> $response.routes[0].legs[0].duration
text    value
----    -----
27 mins  1615


#Calling a SOAP Web Service with a typed Client
#NOTE: This API is not available anymore. Use the code as an example.

PS C:> $uri = 'http://www.webservicex.net/airport.asmx?WSDL'
PS C:> $airportProxy = New-WebServiceProxy -Uri $uri -Namespace ws
PS C:> $airportProxy.getAirportInformationByAirportCode('ZRH')

Result:
<NewDataSet>
  <Table>
    <AirportCode>FRA</AirportCode>
    <CityOrAirportName>FRANKFURT INTL</CityOrAirportName>
    <Country>Germany</Country>
…

#We assign the result to a variable of type XML in order to do some further processing:

PS C:> [XML]$xml = $airportProxy.getAirportInformationByAirportCode('FRA');
PS C:> $xml.NewDataSet.Table[0].CityOrAirportName

FRANKFURT INTL

Pro Tip:

Note that you can save web requests in the Chrome Developer Tools (F12 Tools) directly as a PowerShell script:

The result looks like this:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azure/install-az-ps?view=azps-5.0.0" -Headers @{
"method"="GET"
  "authority"="docs.microsoft.com"
  "scheme"="https"
  "path"="/en-us/powershell/azure/install-az-ps?view=azps-5.0.0"
  "cache-control"="max-age=0"
  "upgrade-insecure-requests"="1"
  "user-agent"="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Safari/537.36"
"accept"="text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9"
  "sec-fetch-site"="none"
  "sec-fetch-mode"="navigate"
  "sec-fetch-user"="?1"
  "sec-fetch-dest"="document"
  "accept-encoding"="gzip, deflate, br"
  "accept-language"="en-US,en;q=0.9"
 
  "if-none-match"="`"BevYgbHK3I9K7WbxPi1FutktnfxT6ySNpBWGQdCiqxY=`""
}

Measure the Execution Time of a Cmdlet

Measure-Command { Get-Service }

Result:
Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 0
Milliseconds      : 10
Ticks             : 102564
TotalDays         : 1.18708333333333E-07
TotalHours        : 2.849E-06
TotalMinutes      : 0.00017094
TotalSeconds      : 0.0102564
TotalMilliseconds : 10.2564

(Measure-Command { Get-Service }).ToString()
00:00:00.0055617

Powershell Remoting

You want to run a Powershell Command on a remote computer without connecting via RDP? Powershell remoting is here to help. 

#Prepare the target machine for PS Remoting
#The Windows Remote Management Service must be running. Verify it using the following cmdlet:
Test-WsMan -ComputerName <computername>

#Activate the remote management service
Enable-PsRemoting -Force


#Option 1: Enter-PSSession
#Open a remote PS Session on the target machine LTMME05
PS C:> Enter-PSSession –ComputerName LTMME05

#The remote machine name is shown in the command prompt. Cmdlets can be executed on the target machine.
[LTMME05] PS C:> hostname
LTMME05

#Option2 : Cmdlets with Option –Computername
PS C:> Get-Process -ComputerName LTMME05 | Select-Object -First 1

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     --  -- -----------
    113       9     6156       7804    64     0.27   8900   1 ACEngSvr

#Option 3 : Invoke-Command (maybe even on multiple machines)
#The examples queries the newest event log entry from 3 different machines
PS C:> Invoke-Command -ComputerName LTMME05, LTMME06, LTMME07 -ScriptBlock {Get-EventLog Security -Newest 1}

#As an Alternative, you can read the computer names from a txt file:
PS C:> Invoke-Command –ComputerName (Get-Content machinelist.txt)…

COM Interop

Powershell can be used to access COM components on Windows, such as the voice synthesizer or Microsoft Excel.

#Voice output with COM Interop
$voice = New-Object –ComObject SAPI.SPVoice
$voice.Speak("Hello Azure Guru");

#Reading of the contents of a file
PS C:> New-Object –ComObject SAPI.SPVoice
PS C:> $text = Get-Content C:File.txt
PS C:> $voice.Speak($text)


#Create an Excel Sheet from OS data using Excel Interop
[Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = "EN-us"
$ex = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
$ex.visible = $true
$exWb = $ex.Workbooks.Add()
$exWs = $exWb.Worksheets.Item(1)

$exWs.Cells.Item(2, 1).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 40

$exWs.Cells.Item(2,1) = "Services Name"
$exWs.Cells.Item(2,2) = "Service Status"

$row = 3
$services = Get-Service | Select-Object -First 20
foreach($Service in $services)
{
    $exWs.Cells.Item($row,1) = $Service.DisplayName
    $exWs.Cells.Item($row, 2) = $Service.Status.ToString()
    if($Service.Status -eq "Running")
    {
        $exWs.Cells.Item($row,1).Font.ColorIndex = 10
        $exWs.Cells.Item($row,2).Font.ColorIndex = 10
    }
    elseif($Service.Status -eq "Stopped")
    {
        $exWs.Cells.Item($row,1).Font.ColorIndex = 3
        $exWs.Cells.Item($row,2).Font.ColorIndex = 3
    }
    $row++
    Write-Host "row++"
}
$exWs.SaveAs("C:ServiceStatusReport.xlsx");

The result of the Excel Interop Script is an Excel Workbook that contains the windows services: