When I write a PowerShell module, it typically includes more than one export function. Where you store your module functions is a great discussion topic and I don’t think there is necessarily one best practice for everyone. I think it might depend on the number and complexity of the functions. Are other people contributing code...

Learn how to build a user activity PowerShell script that will pull information from the Windows event log for a local computer.

Use PowerShell Get-Content to powerfully read file data and PowerShell streams to manipulate the content just how you need it!

Do the users in your organization ever forget their passwords? Surely not! Has an Active Directory user locked out their account? No way! Let's see what we can do to find locked out users in Active Directory with PowerShell!

One of the everyday use cases with PSWriteHTML is to create a simple view of PowerShell data in a table. While PowerShell comes with a built-in cmdlet ConvertTo-Html, it's basic in its functionality. It makes an HTML representation of PowerShell data, but it brings no CSS, JavaScript, or other functionality. While for some use cases, it's enough, the other times, you need to make an effort to make it usable.

A while back I’ve blogged about deploying e-mail spoofing warnings. These warns inject a little bit of HTML into e-mails to let people know a e-mail is external or not trusted. For a while now Microsoft has a native option for this. You do need a somewhat recent version of Outlook but the native version... Read More

If you ever encounter an error while trying to create a new domain within a forest saying, "The replication operation encountered a database error," it makes you sweat a bit. Your brain tells you it will be a nightmare to fix, do I have proper backups to make it happen, and the question "why now" shows up. The post Active Directory Domain Services could not replicate the directory partition – The replication operation encountered a database error appeared first on Evotec.

One of the most common hangups when querying Active Directory with PowerShell is how to properly build filter syntax. The Filter and LDAP Filter parameters on all ActiveDirectory PowerShell module cmdlets is a black box to many.

Today we are going to talk about the HydrationKit maintained by Johan Arwidmark @jarwidmark which allows you to set up a complete modern deployment environment for operating systems. To start I created two WPF applications with MahApps and PowerShell of course. They allow you to modify the complete environment of the hydrationKit. You can modify the following parameters: Computers Name Network addresses Domain Name DHCP configuration Passwords To use these two applications you have to wait a little more because Johan 😉 has not yet released the version based on Windows Server 2022.

SonarCloud is the SaaS version of SonarQube, a tool to detect and fix issues in your code by examining code quality and security vulnerabilities. I needed to automate the onboarding of both users and code projects into SonarCloud to take away the need to manually provision these items into the system. SonarCloud has a Web … Continue reading Automating SonarCloud with PowerShell – Part

This is a bit of a short one, but I’m trying to get back to two blogs a week slowly, today we’re talking about a pretty cool feature that Microsoft has made for Windows, but doesn’t get the attention it deserves. When you’re troubleshooting WLAN issues there’s a lot of locations to investigate – If... Read More

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

Make updating the portable version of VSCode easier.

Words: 470 Time to read: ~ 2 minutes Don’t talk to me about it! Four years ago (I know, where did the time go?), I wrote about Table Column Differences with T-SQL and PowerShell. A Michal commented on the post, asking how to get a specific output from his search. Hi, Thanks for your sharing. … Continue reading "Table Column Differences Part 03 – Compare-SqlTableColumns"

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

A collection of links and resources related to my PASS Data Community Summit 2021 presentation Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools including bonus content! Resources dbatools main site dbatools documentation How to remove old versions of dbatools from your system SQL Server Community Slack (join #dbatools) Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches GitHub repository… The post PASS Data Community Summit 2021 Presentation Resources appeared first on FLX SQL with Andy Levy.

I’ve published a new project to the PowerShell Gallery. This is something that I needed, and maybe you do as well. Even though I have the typical clock running in the Windows taskbar, I have an ultrawide monitor so it isn’t always easy to read. I had been running the xclock app from WSL which...

Not blogging for over a year has really changed my outlook on titling blog posts. tl;dr https://github.com/brianbunke/TeamsStatus Why? So my family knows the answer before they walk down the hall and open the door. Also because my wife linked lights with an infrared remote as a suggestion, and that was the final push I needed to prioritize solving this automagically. Table of Contents tl;dr Prerequisites Detect Teams Status Locally? Why? Teams Code NewActivity Red the Light Backstory / Why Kasa Kasa Code Kasa App Red the Slack New Slack app and key Slack Code Task Scheduler In Conclusion Prerequisites PowerShell and Python Walkthrough assumes Windows Microsoft Teams is where you take most/all your video calls Kasa KL125 smart bulb on firmware version 1.

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

Before we get into this, I recently setup a new CyberDrain Discord server for questions about CIPP, and the CTFs I give. Join our discord here I’ve blogged about monitoring the settings to approving application consent not too long ago, where I’ve discussed that it’s annoying we don’t have a central way of doing this... Read More

The other day I read an interesting article on Adam Bertram’s blog about editing files with a text editor in PowerShell. Naturally, the PowerShell wheels in my head began turning. While I was intrigued by some of the options in the article, I’ve in fact installed the Micro editor to play with, I realized I...

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

Over the summer, I spent some (a lot of) time working on updates to a script at work which runs multiple processes in parallel. Everything seemed to work OK for a while, but then everything broke. It broke right around the time dbatools 1.1 dropped, so I started thinking that something must have changed there.… The post Lesson Learned From Multi-Threading with dbatools appeared first on FLX SQL with Andy Levy.

One of the topics we’ve discussed in the PowerShell Cmdlet Working Group is a request to make it easier to insert dynamic parameters. I am a bit torn on this. On one hand, I see the value in dynamic parameters. These are parameters that only exist if some condition is met, such as if the...

 This week, I got into a twitter discussion about a presenter posting their slides for delegates. My personal preference is to always share the slides. Often, especially when I was working for an employer, I'd share a PDF of the file rather than the slides. Some decks had had a LOT of effort put in (some by inhouse graphics guys) and giving those animations away was sub-optimal for IP reasons.

So I’ve been hard at work on CIPP the last couple of weeks and because of that haven’t had time to blog really. The great thing is that all of the stuff I normally blog about is pretty easy to integrate into CIPP. One of them being the subject today; sometimes you have leavers in... Read More

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

I was given the opportunity to get a review copy of Thomas Lee’s new book ‘Windows Server Automation with PowerShell Cookbook 4th edition’. And of course, given my eagerness for learning new PowerShell related subjects, I had to give it a go. Thomas Lee’s new book is focused on using PowerShell 7 for Windows Server administration. The book focuses on Windows Server 2022 and will provide well-explained recipes for utilizing PowerShell 7 in administrating Windows Server.

I’m pretty sure I’ve discussed this before, but Microsoft is scheduled to release PowerShell 7.2 soon, I thought it might be good to revisit this topic. Here’s the potential issue. If you’ve been installing PowerShell 7 releases for a while, and have been enabling PowerShell remoting, you most likely have a list of remoting session...

 Many of you reading that blog know I'm a big supporter of PowerShell 7. I hope that many of you share my enthusiasm. After writing several books on PowerShell, and two on PowerShell 7, I find it a pretty good product.One of the challenges which PowerShell brings to the enterprise is updates. Like most software products, there are bugs and vulnerabilities in PowerShell. I was reminded again of this fact reading an article from my Powershell Paper.

I realized it had been a while since I wrote a Friday Fun post. These posts are intended to demonstrate PowerShell in a fun and often non-practical way. The end result is generally irrelevant. The PowerShell scripting techniques and concepts I use are the real takeaways. The task is nothing more than a means to...

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

Here’s another task that I seem to be constantly fiddling with using PowerShell. What files did I work on yesterday? Or what files were modified in the last 48 hours? Obviously, Get-ChildItem is going to be the primary command. It is simple enough to get files based on an extension from a given folder path,...

This is my super secret project that I have been working on for some weeks. A lot of my time outside of work was sunk into this effort. Somewhere last year I made a post about a better partner portal. This was super well received and I got a lot of amazing feedback on it.... Read More

Time to read: ~ 2 minutes Words: 328 Welcome to T-SQL Tuesday, the monthly blog post invitational where we’re given a topic and asked to write about it. This month we have John McCormack (Blog | Twitter) asking, “What are your go-to handy scripts“? For this post, I’m going to break these down into different … Continue reading "T-SQL Tuesday #143 – Short code exam

I expect many of you are like me and have done, or will do, an in-place upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. It is easy enough to run a PowerShell expression like this to see the operating system name. I get a value like Windows 11 Pro. However, operating system information is also stored...

My go to scripts for day-to-day tasks.

In this blog post, I will go through how I handle API pagination with Powershell when working with different APIs. I will use the rickandmorty API to showcase what pagination is and how you can work with it, in Powershell. Why do some APIs even have pagination? Pagination is just like when you are shopping on the web. Let’s say you are looking for a new laptop. When you search for the product on the webshop, the results will usually be split out into multiple pages, only showing maybe 20-50 products per page.

I recently had a request to create a small applet/windows form that would allow regular end users to perform an administrative task. For example, restart the Print Spooler service. We did not want to grant the user any elevated rights, only to give them a program that would allow them to perform the single task and nothing more. PowerShell to the rescue – Beginning with Windows Vista, the administrator security token split with the standard user token.

Windows 11 comes with Chat from Microsoft Teams which is ‘a signature, lightweight experience brought right to the Taskbar to let Teams personal account users quickly start a video call or chat with friends and family.’1 The problem with this is that it is only available for Personal accounts and not for Work or School accounts.  The new Teams experience on Windows 11 and Chat are intended for personal Microsoft accounts and will be available only to individuals using such accounts.

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged! I’ve been super busy with a secret project I am hoping to release soon. This blog is dedicated to a friend of mine. His question was “Can we disable the anonymous report functionality in M365?” This functionality gives users a pseudo-anonymous ID in the M365 portal when reporting... Read More

Time to read: ~ 2 minutes Words: 397 A couple of days ago, I was running some unit tests across a piece of PowerShell code for work and a test was failing where I didn’t expect it to. After realising that the issue was with the workings of TrimEnd and my thoughts on how TrimEnd … Continue reading "The Surprising Working of TrimEnd"

A short post today to announce the second video on VMware vSphere 7 administration is available on the Editions ENI website. To complete the suite after the introduction to virtualization with VMware vSphere 7 for a 2h34 training. Decription on ENI EDTION website link Discover my new course the administration of VMware vSphere 7 with this time a 3h35 training Decription on ENI EDTION website link 1.

Search SQL Server’s errorlog for problems with PowerShell using community tools

Here is your weekly round up of what is happening in the world of PowerShell. Do you have a suggestion for this post? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on twitter.

Previously I’ve written about using MSAL and PowerShell with Application Permissions and Client Credentials and Certificate based authentication. Also with Delegated Permissions and Device Code flow authentication. The one I haven’t written a post on is performing interactive authentication to Microsoft Graph using MSAL with PowerShell and Delegated Permissions.… keep reading The post Interactive Authentication to Microsoft Graph using MSAL with PowerShell and Delegated Permissions appeared first on darrenjrobinson - Bespoke Identity and Access Management Solutions.

If there’s one task I’ve never stopped doing, it is finding files. I am constantly creating new ways to organize files and display them in a meaningful format. Naturally, PowerShell is a great tool for this task. Get-ChildItem is obviously the proper starting point. The cmdlet works fine in getting only files from a folder...

Office 365 is a huge beast. It has so many services that it's hard to track all of them. It's even harder if you want to manage Office 365 using PowerShell. Microsoft makes many different PowerShell modules available for you, such as AzureAD, AzureADPreview, ExchangeOnline, MicrosoftTeams, and recently, Microsoft.Graph. But even with so many different modules, there are still tasks that Microsoft won't let you do from PowerShell.

I hope you’ve been enjoying the last few posts on working with PSDrives. To round out the set, I thought I’d remind you of a command in the PSScriptTools module that I use often, especially when teaching a live class or presenting at a conference. As you’ve seen, I use PSDrives as shortcuts to commonly...