Today I needed to pass on the RDP files for a bunch of Azure VMs to an external developer.

Rather than manually click on the download links in the Azure Portal each time these dev VMs are re-generated, I took the PowerShell route. This was simplified by the fact that all of the VMs in question had a similar Service Name.

Here’s the two lines it took to generate the RDP files, assuming that the Azure Service name for these VMs started with ‘dev-‘, and also assuming that I’m already connected to Azure PowerShell and have the correct subscription selected:

$devVms = Get-AzureVM | Where-Object {$_.ServiceName -like 'dev-*'} 
$devVms | ForEach-Object {Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -Name $_.Name -LocalPath "C:\temp\dev_rdp\$($_.Name).rdp" -ServiceName $_.ServiceName}