In case if you need to remotely restart Windows service, here is my Powershell script.

As soon as we have ICMP/ping disabled between our development environments, I've used WMI pings to determine, if remote machine is running.

When you need to grant access to Azure SQL PaaS database, you can use following T-SQL scripts.

In case if you ever need to create Windows service from an executable or even bat-file, please feel free to use the following configuration in Powershell DSC.

The solution based on the NSSM software which is very similar to srvany.exe (from Windows 2003 Kit). The main difference NSSM from srvany - is that srvany does not close the underlying process if the service is stopped. And NSSM does close it. Download NSSM.

If you ever need to unzip BIG archive files in Powershell DSC configurations (during deployment some software), you will possibly get stuck, because using Archive resource is not suitable for this task as it is very slow. xArchive also will not help.

One possible solution is to unzip it with 7zip or some other command line utility using WindowsProcess resource, but be warned that WindowsProcess will just start the process and then will go to the next instruction in your configuration. See the example:

Sometime it's very difficult to find error in Powershell script, especially if script is running in some dedicated session, for example, under SYSTEM account. There will be errors but you'll never know about them.

That's why I started to search a way to log output from Powershell-console to file. Here is the solution.

Sometimes the following error appear while starting VMware vSphere PowerCLI:

Get-PowerCLIVersion : The term 'Get-PowerCLIVersion' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet,
function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was
included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\vSphere
PowerCLI\Scripts\Initialize-PowerCLIEnvironment.ps1:38 char:12
+ $version = Get-PowerCLIVersion
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (Get-PowerCLIVersion:String) [], CommandNotFoundExce
ption
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException