Getting last modified software on Windows using PowerShell

Getting the list of the last modified software on Windows is actually simple, if using PowerShell

Photo by Miti on Unsplash

Whenever I get requests like "hey, how can I get the lastly installed software on my machine?", I try to resolve them with code and as simple as possible. Turns out that on Windows, PowerShell can be an excellent tool for scripts like those. On this post, let's address that using PowerShell and review how it became a fun, simple and quick exercise.

Using Get-WmiObject

The Get-WmiObject cmdlet is what we need to get Windows diag information. By combining it with Export-Csv we can export all installed software on our machines with:

Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product | Export-Csv installed.csv

Using Get-ChildItem

The next part consists in using the Get-ChildItem cmdlet to filter out our exported data. That can be done with:

# getting last modified files
Get-ChildItem C:\ -rec | sort LastWriteTime | select -last 1000 | Export-Csv files.csv

Conclusion

Doing this simple exercise was fun, simple and quick using PowerShell. Don't know PowerShell yet? I would urge you to take a look and learn it (even if just the basics). PowerShell is a powerful tool used extensively in devops on Windows, Azure and Linux.

Oh, and yes, I really don't miss the days before PowerShell!

References

• Get-WmiObject
• Get-ChildItem 
• Export-Csv
• PowerShell.org
• Installing PowerShell Core on Linux 
• Find latest modified file information in PowerShell
• Windows : How to list files recursively with size and last access date?

See Also

• My journey to 1 million articles read
• Determining installed .NET Framework versions using PowerShell
• PowerShell - The server committed a protocol violation
• Windows Subsystem for Linux, the best way to learn Linux on Windows
• Why I use Fedora
• How I fell in love with i3
• Diagnosing and Fixing WSL initialization issues
• Creating a Ubuntu Desktop instance on Azure

PowerShell - The server committed a protocol violation

Let's understand what that error means and review 3 different ways to fix it.

Photo by Max Rovensky on Unsplash

This sort article details a good trick for those getting the following error in PowerShell: 

The server committed a protocol violation

After googling ducking around, I found three different solutions for this problem:

1. Modifying your powershell.exe.config;
2. Modifying your request in order to avoid it stopping if your url is invalid in .NET
3. Modifying your request in order to avoid it stopping if your url is invalid in PowerShell.

Let's review each of them and understand a little more about the problem.

Solution 1 - Modifying powershell.exe.config

This solution will apply to all PowerShell requests so use with caution. Also, this solution is not portable so, if you plan to run this script on a machine you don't have admin access to, this solution will probably not work.

<system.net>

<settings>

<httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing="true" />

</settings>

</system.net>

Solution 2 - Modifying your request in .NET

To modify your request, have the code below before you actually run Invoke-WebRequest:

$netAssembly = [Reflection.Assembly]::GetAssembly([System.Net.Configuration.SettingsSection])

if($netAssembly)
{
    $bindingFlags = [Reflection.BindingFlags] "Static,GetProperty,NonPublic"
    $settingsType = $netAssembly.GetType("System.Net.Configuration.SettingsSectionInternal")

    $instance = $settingsType.InvokeMember("Section", $bindingFlags, $null, $null, @())

    if($instance)
    {
        $bindingFlags = "NonPublic","Instance"
        $useUnsafeHeaderParsingField = $settingsType.GetField("useUnsafeHeaderParsing", $bindingFlags)

        if($useUnsafeHeaderParsingField)
        {
          $useUnsafeHeaderParsingField.SetValue($instance, $true)
        }
    }
}

Solution 3 - Modifying your request in PowerShell

This is probably the simplest. Just run the line below:

[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::ServerCertificateValidationCallback = { $true }

Conclusion

On this post we reviewed three different ways to resolve a problem in PowerShell. Don't know PowerShell yet? I would urge you to take a look and learn it (even if just the basics). PowerShell is a powerful tool used extensively in devops on Windows, Azure and Linux.

References

• Invoke-WebRequest
• Ignoring SSL trust in PowerShell System.Net.WebClient
• Invoke-WebRequest - protocol violation when attempting to login using XML

See Also

• My journey to 1 million articles read
• Getting last modified software on Windows using PowerShell
• Determining installed .NET Framework versions using PowerShell
• Windows Subsystem for Linux, the best way to learn Linux on Windows
• Why I use Fedora Linux
• How I fell in love with i3
• Diagnosing and Fixing WSL initialization issues
• Creating a Ubuntu Desktop instance on Azure
• Hosting NuGet packages on GitHub
• My journey to 1 million articles read
• How and why use stronger passwords

ASP.NET - How to allow anonymous requests on secure endpoints

How to allow unauthenticated requests on authorized endpoints using ASP.NET? Let's take a look.

Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash

In a previous article, I described how to extend the ASP.NET pipeline with custom security. Turns out that certain endpoints were still required to operated unauthenticated. How do we allow those requests to be processed? The solution relies on:

1. Decorating the security attribute with the AllowAnonymous as discussed on the previous post.
2. Detecting the current request is an ActionExecutingContext and allowing the request to proceed conditionally.

Let's see how we can write a custom RequirePermission attribute to solve that problem.

Writing a custom ActionFilter Attribute

Writing a custom ActionFilter attribute isn't complicated. Here's one code that demonstrates how to do that elegantly:

Using the Attribute

Next, we ca use our attribute to decorate our actions so it runs as soon as our endpoint is hit:

Conclusion

This was a quick post extending the previous discussion on how to implement custom action filters to have a better control over the requests agains our application. On this post I explained how you could intercept requests on your application and react to them using these attributes. For a complete understanding of the project, please the original discussion

See Also

• My journey to 1 million articles read
• Adding Application Insights telemetry to your ASP.NET Core website
• Send emails from ASP.NET Core websites using SendGrid and Azure
• Creating ASP.NET Core websites with Docker
• Building a custom security framework with ASP.NET applications 
• Hosting NuGet packages on GitHub
• How and why use stronger passwords
• Security and development: how much is being done?
• Security is only as strong as the weakest link
• The Laws of security
• Privacy and Ethics
• Integrated security vulnerability alerts on GitHub - Why it matters
• Building and Running ASP.NET Core apps on Linux