I am extending some tests we are running in powershell. It is used to validate that the chef configs we are setting up so that all moving parts are running.

One thing I tried to google that wasn’t  perfectly clear to a n00b like me was how to use static objects in powershell, specifically take byte array and interpret it as a UTF8 string.

Apparently this is how you do it:

$enc = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8
$c = $enc.GetString($result.Content)

Where the $result came out of a WebRequest. This means I can test that $c contains an expected value and fail the script, and thus – the build, if the result is unexpected.