Change in Azure Cmdlets

I know. Surprise! I am actually sitting down to do some blogging. It has been a very busy 2017. Last week I just returned home from delivering 4 sessions at the PowerShell Conference in Europe. The organizers did an outstanding job. We all had a great time.

I like to be prepared before speaking to an audience. A month before the conference, I had everything prepared. Every line of code was thoroughly tested. A week before the conference, I took a few days off in Venice, Italy and ran through everything one more time. All the code worked. 24 hours prior to delivering one of my presentations, I ran through the code again and…. It broke.

I started to receive errors like these two when trying to work with Azure.

Save-AzureRmProfile : The term 'Save-AzureRmProfile' 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 line:1 char:1

+ Save-AzureRmProfile -Path $AzureProfile -Force

+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (Save-AzureRmProfile:String) [], CommandNotFoundException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException

Run Login-AzureRmAccount to login.

+ CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (:) [New-AzureRmResourceGroup], PSInvalidOperationException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvalidOperation,Microsoft.Azure.Commands.ResourceManager.Cmdlets.Implementation.NewAzureResourceGroupCmdlet

+ PSComputerName : localhost

One of the frustrations that we Microsoft trainers have with Azure is how fast it changes. At one level, this is really good. It means that Microsoft is actively improving the product. However, the reason for the code breaking is a bit frustrating. Below are the two cmdlets have changed.

Old	New
Save-AzureRmProfile	Save-AzureRmContext
Select-AzureRmProfile	Import-AzureRmContext

These cmdlets essentially do the same thing. I was working with Azure using local background jobs to perform multiple tasks in Azure at the same time. I fixed this code a few hours before going on stage. As of this writing, no mention in the online documentation of the old cmdlets about the change. On another note, the old cmdlets worked when I was not using background jobs. Interesting twist to the story.

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