Azure Fridays - A Powershell script to Download RSS Videos

Azure Fridays

If you are like me then time is a very precious and limited commodity. Also we both love learning new things! Unfortunately these two statements often conflict ;) That’s why I’m such a big fan of Azure Friday which is a weekly 10(ish) minute video series on Azure. It gives me just enough information to let me know what’s happening in Azure but also let’s me decide where I might want to dive deeper.

So today on twitter Alexandre Brisebois (@Brisebois) mentioned he’d love to be able to download all the videos! I thought this would be great as I’m often on a train or plane and it would be handy to have them offline to catch up. Luckily Stéphane Fréchette (@sfrechette) replied letting us both know of a blog post by non other than Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) that included a powershell script for downloading videos from an RSS feed!

@Brisebois @Azure @marc_gagne pretty easy to do https://t.co/ScSSkNVW4d @shanselman

— Stéphane Fréchette (@sfrechette) November 18, 2014

So naturally I took the script, entered Azure Friday’s RSS feed and ran it. Sadly I was getting an error message using the System.Net.WebClient.DownloadFile method. I tried to debug it but got nowhere, so I simply swapped it out for a call to Invoke-WebRequest and luckily for me that worked!

So if you’d like to download all the Azure Friday videos simply use the script below. I’ll need to update it to ensure that it doesn’t re-download files that it doesn’t need to, but it’s a good start.

cheers,
Marc.
@marc_gagne