Earlier in the year I took charge of my work’s Windows 7 to Windows 10 Migration. I work at a college, and a good part of the machines we manage are computer labs, for which we have to manage about 130 different software packages (I should probably mention at this point that we use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to manage all of our images, drivers, and packages). As part of the migration, I wanted to mark all packages in the labs as supporting Windows 7 Only in MDT, and then gradually bring in each package, testing to make sure their installation, settings configuration, and user experience didn’t break in Windows 10, and afterwards removing the OS restriction once I had verified the app was OK. I also wanted a way to query a package that is dependency of a bunch of other packages, so I could then test all those dependent applications to make sure my updating their shared dependency didn’t in turn break those packages themselves(I had one package in mind here for the shared dependency issue. It’s name rhymes with lava)
Through having the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit installed on my computer I had access to all the MDT PowerShell Cmdlets, and could mount my MDT shares as a drive in PowerShell (cool stuff), but I didn’t really have the fine grain control I wanted in order query and manipulate the MDT applications in this manner. So what would be the shortest, easiest, most efficient way to get around these problems? Spend hours upon hours creating a PowerShell module of course! Here’s an excerpt from the README file to give you an idea of what it does:
- Get-MDTApplication
- Retrieves MDT applications, either by name/guid, or just all of them.
- Get-MDTApplicationDependency
- Retrieves either the parent or child dependencies of an MDT application. Can either return one depth, or can recurse the entire depth of the dependency tree
- Get-MDTApplicationSupportedPlatform
- Queries MDT applications to see if they have the SupportedPlatform attribute set.
- Set-MDTApplicationSupportedPlatform
- Sets the SupportedPlatform attribute on MDT applications
- Find-MDTApplicationContent
- Searches through either the installcmd attribute or the install scripts themselves of all the MDT applications in a share for the specified string(i.e “pause”, “powershell.exe”, “C:\Program Files (x86)”, etc.)
It took me a while to make, but I learned a ton in the process, and in the end I have a tool that helps me out a great deal when updating or changing applications. If you’d like to learn more, check out the project’s page below. The README file on that page should have all the info you need to get it up and running on your computer.
https://github.com/JohnForet/MDTApplicationTools
Thanks!
johnforet.wordpress.com 