After reading some awesome posts on the topic, I've been shamed into making my pipelines a little more efficient.

Using the PowerShell WhatIf parameter and [CmdletBinding()], you can test the waters with potentially destructive PowerShell commands.

One of the top reasons I love PowerShell so much is that from the beginning, it was designed to let you, yes you, make it run better for the way you work. In fact,...

Go deep into setting up NuGet repositories on IIS and Windows Server using NuGet.Server, BaGet, ProGet and more!

I have written several articles on using PowerShell to send alerts and notifications to Microsoft Teams, but up until now they were set up using only the task scheduler. As more and more companies move to the cloud I wanted to see how I could do cloud infrastructure alerting as well. In this article I am using an Azure RunBook to connect to my Office 365 tenant, parse my licenses, and return any that need reconciliation.

Learn how to download psexec, launch a psexec remote cmd, cover psexec examples and how to use psexec and PowerShell together!

Back in June of this year I presented a session at PowerShell Southampton on using Ansible and PowerShell together. There was a fair amount of interest in this topic both at the event and online afterwards, so I decided to follow it up here with a series of posts looking at the basics for someone … Continue reading Ansible, Windows and PowerShell: the Basics – Introduction →

In this article, we discuss how to grant users simple admin rights temporarily like installing software. This helps keep IT from getting bogged down. One of the more frequent conflicts between an IT department and an end user is the use of administrative privileges. End users are used to having this permission on their personal+ Read More The post Using Make Me Admin For Administrator Privilege appeared first on WinSysBlog.

Learn how you can add tab-completion to any PowerShell command parameter using a little known feature called argument completers.

In enterprise environments, you will usually find an array of different Windows operating systems, hardware and of course software. Typically, machines are managed and configured with group policy and SCCM, or perhaps other more modern methods like Chef or Puppet. One of the symptoms of an unhealthy Windows computer is the amount of time it+ Read More The post Measuring Reboot Time With PowerShell appeared first on WinSysBlog.

Learn how to update PowerShell to version 7 on a single machine, using a GPO or using PowerShell itself in this step by step walkthrough.

As part of some automated deployment work for ESXi I was assisting a colleague with, they had hit an issue with an out of the box deployment of ESXi beginning with a blank password for the root account. The automation tool of choice Ansible was using an SSH connection to ESXi to make the initial … Continue reading Connecting To An ESXi Host With No Root Password Set →

Understand Windows environment variables in Windows 10 and other OSes, set environment variables with PowerShell and more in this in-depth walkthrough!

The call for speakers for the 2020 PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit is open until October 1st. I can definitely speak from experience when I say that this is the best PowerShell conference in North America if you’re interested in PowerShell and networking with other like-minded people. I’ve attended every year since its inception and have spoken at it about half as many times. While I’m in no way affiliated with the organizers, based on their site, they’re not only looking for deep-dive content but also intermediate sessions.

Get introduced to the powerful VMware PowerShell module known as PowerCLI. In this PowerCLI tutorial, get up to speed in no time.

PoshRSJob has been my go to module for Parallelization for years... let's see if a head to head test with the new PowerShell 7 feature will change that.

Nothing fancy here.  For a given set of usernames, show me the common groups that they are *all* in. EG; if I have a list of 20 usernames, I need to check all of their group memberships and find the common thread(s) that run between every user. There are probably a dozen of ways to... Continue reading →

Setting up a new Active Directory is an easy task. You download and install Windows Server, install required roles and in 4 hours or less have a basic Active Directory setup. In an ideal world that would be all and your only task would be to manage users, computers, and groups occasionally creating some Group Policies. Unfortunately, things with Active Directory aren't as easy as I've pictured it. Active Directory is a whole ecosystem and works well ranging from small companies with ten users to 500k users or more (haven't seen one myself - but so they say!).

I'm a big fan of PowerShellGallery. It's easy to use, Microsoft owned, a place to host your PowerShell modules. Every time I release a new PowerShell module, it's readily available for me or anyone with a single command Install-Module. No need to host it yourself, no need to prepare anything - plug & play. Additionally, if your PowerShell module has any dependencies, it will download and install them, so it directly works out of the box.

One of the issues you face with setting up an Azure Site to Site VPN is making sure that your Azure Local Network Gateway always has your Public/On-premises IP. This setup is fine when used in environments that have Static IPs (and yes if setting this up for a Business or Production, it is highly recommended to have a static IP!). However, when used in environments like my home network or lab environments - which has a Dynamic IP which could change at any time it will cause connectivity issues if your IP changes and the Local Network Gateway is not updated.

Migrate all the things One of the common tasks with Hyper-V is to migrate a VM from one node to another. You can do it the hard way (export/copy/import) or the easy way - with Live Migrate. Sometimes you may want to migrate only storage (one LUN/CSV to another). As always - there are multiple ways to achieve that: Using GUI Using PowerShell Migrate using GUI This is a fairly simple yet boring process.

Here’s my PowerShell.org posts for August 2019. August 2019 AWS Service Acronyms

Learn two ways to send encrypted email through Office 365 (and unencrypted) using PowerShell with code examples.

If you’ve been using PowerShell for very long at all, then you should already be familiar with Get-Command and Get-Help. While I like to say that Get-Command is for finding commands and Get-Help is for learning how to use those commands once you’ve found them, there is overlap between these two commands depending on how you use them. I believe in following the best practice of not using aliases or positional parameters in any code that I save or share with others, but in this blog article, I’m going to show how things work in the real world.

This month the Research Triangle PowerShell user's group is proud to be hosting Mathias Jessen in person on September 9th at 6:30 pm EST in Raleigh to do a deep dive exploration of the corners of Active Directory Domain Services most admins probably don’t think about that often.

However, one detail they left out of that post is how to clone the users & groups, and their respective permissions from one Workspace to another. It's a pretty simple thing to do, with one not-completely-obvious quirk to it.

Learn how to use the PowerShell Import-Csv and Export-Csv cmdlets to manage CSV files with ease.

PSDay.UK 2019 takes place on Saturday 28th September 2019 in Birmingham at the International Convention Centre (ICC) for a fun day learning PowerShell, DevOps, Cloud & Automation from community & industry experts for Beginners to Advanced practitioners. In this short series of posts, I’m going to highlight the three session tracks from which you can pick … Continue reading PSDa

At VMworld US 2019, Kyle Ruddy and I presented a session named “Introduction to PowerCLI.” In it, we demonstrated how to get started with VMware PowerCLI to manage and automate your VMware environments. The goal was to make the command line a little more familiar – and a little less intimidating – especially if you have never used PowerCLI or PowerShell before. About half the session was spent performing a live demo, because my hope is you can follow along back at your desk with the session recording and the exact code I used.

The Research Triangle PowerShell user group is hosting a PowerShell Saturday event in Raleigh, NC on September 21st and 22nd. Read more for event details.

Today I'm humbled, shocked, and proud to announce that I'm now a Microsoft MVP.

Time is running out to attend the Research Triangle PowerShell Saturday. The main conference is on Saturday, September 21st, 2019 in Raleigh, North Carolina. There’s also a concentrated 6-hour security session on Sunday, September 22nd. Tickets can be purchased for one day or both. Seating is limited, however, for the Sunday security session, so get your… Continue reading Research Trian

Time to read: 2.5 minutes Words: 504 Previously on… I’ve talked before about a couple of topics that this blog post pertains to Pester Testing Self Contained Scripts introduced Chris Dent’s function Get-FunctionInfo Pester showed me a bug in our existing build process. Can you find it? and Dot Sourcing with PSScriptRoot talked about how … Continue reading "Splitting Functio

The Research Triangle PowerShell Saturday is Saturday, September 21st, 2019 in Raleigh, North Carolina. There’s also a 6-hour security session on Sunday, September 22nd, 2019. Tickets can be purchased for just one of the days or both, but seating is limited for the Sunday post-con so don’t wait until the last minute! Based on the schedule, this event should be almost like a mini PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit which makes it well worth the price of admission.

PSDay.UK 2019 takes place on Saturday 28th September 2019 in Birmingham at the International Convention Centre (ICC) for a fun day learning PowerShell, DevOps, Cloud & Automation from community & industry experts for Beginners to Advanced practitioners. In this short series of posts, I’m going to highlight the three session tracks from which you can pick … Continue reading PSDa

For the last few weeks I'm working on a small project, that should be released within next few weeks (it is open source so don't worry - you'll get to play with it). This project requires me to compare two or more objects and tell if those are equal and if those aren't to what degree. Of course, PowerShell offers built-in functionality via Compare-Object command. It's mighty but it leaves comparing differences, different properties to you.

Intro After some time - 6 months in fact - we were finally able to meet again. At first we had to postpone PPoSh Meetups because of various personal matters. Then I was attending PSConfEU and had to prepare my talks there. Then Summer Break. But… At the PSConfEU both Bartek Bielawski and Jakub Jareš asked me if I’m planning any Meetups. Well, you can’t say no to this :smile:. Again, thanks to Obejctivity we were able to meet and - suprise, surprise - talk about Pester all day long.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a time and a place for Notepad++. There was a point in time where I preached how amazing the editor was for all purposes, even for PowerShell! That time is over. As our code increases in complexity, we need a code editor that can keep up with the workload. With Notepad++ and other basic text editors, we have a much harder time doing any code troubleshooting or any debugging on the fly.

Preview 3 of PowerShell 7 was released yesterday. It can be downloaded from the PowerShell repository on GitHub. Be sure to choose the preview version for the appropriate operating system. It should go without saying that anything with preview in its name should NOT be installed on a mission-critical production system. The examples shown in this blog article are being run on a system running Windows 10 (x64).

In the previous post we discussed SharePoint Online cloud service. Now, let’s talk about SharePoint farm deployed on premises. We can specify Primary and Secondary site collection administrators in the SharePoint Central Administration portal by clicking on Application Management and… Continue reading →

Starting on dbatools version 1.0.31 we introduced better coverage for commands that make use of PowerShell Remoting. Which commands? Commands like Get-DbaComputerCertificate, Get-DbaPrivilege, Get-DbaClientAlias, just to mention a few of them, make use of the internal function Invoke-Command2 which uses New-PSSession when we run it against a remote computer.   “Why have you changed it?&

PSDay.UK 2019 takes place on Saturday 28th September 2019 in Birmingham at the International Convention Centre (ICC) for a fun day learning PowerShell, DevOps, Cloud & Automation from community & industry experts for Beginners to Advanced practitioners. In this short series of posts, I’m going to highlight the three session tracks from which you can pick … Continue reading PSDa

В предыдущем посте мы рассматривали облачный сервис SharePoint Online. Теперь давайте поговорим о ферме SharePoint, развернутой локально. Мы можем указать первичного (Primary) и вторичного (Secondary) администраторов коллекции сайтов SharePoint в портале SharePoint Central Administration, выбрав в меню пункт Application Management… Читать далее →

Invoke-Command Remote Variables PowerShell Hello, Invoke-Command is great to use one of the “fan out” parallel execution possibilities with PowerShell. Indeed, by default it can execute the same command on 32 servers, simultaneously, without knowing anything about threads or runspaces. … Continue reading → The post Invoke-Command Remote Variables PowerShell appeared first on IT for Dummies.

PoshBot is a chat bot written in PowerShell and created by DevBlackOps. ‘It makes extensive use of classes introduced in PowerShell 5.0. PowerShell modules are loaded into PoshBot and instantly become available as bot commands.’1 PoshBot can do pretty much anything you configure it to do. You can have it create Azure servers, reset Active Directory passwords, create and modify help desk tickets, license Office 365 users, etc.

I’ll be presenting “PowerShell + SQL Server = Better Together” and “Writing Award Winning PowerShell Functions and Script Modules” at SQL Saturday #867 in Baton Rouge Louisiana this Saturday, August 17th. The event is free, although you need to register. Here’s a little information about what you can expect from my sessions: PowerShell + SQL Server = Better Together As a SQL Server professional, are you able to make a rhyme or reason to this thing called PowerShell? Need to accomplish something? Do you use Windows PowerShell or PowerShell Core? How will you interface with PowerShell? With the PowerShell console, ISE, VSCode, SAPIEN PowerShell Studio, or something else? Will you use Cmdlets from one of the various SQL related PowerShell modules? If so, which one? SQLPS, SQLServer, DBATools, etc.

In the SharePoint Online admin portal we can specify the primary admin and the list of other admins in the properties menu of the site. Let’s look at how we can do it in PowerShell. Prologue To interact with SharePoint… Continue reading →

TL;DR: Use . $PSScriptRoot\ instead of . .\ if you’re using where the script is as a reference to load other files. Words: 1033 Time to read: ~ 5 minutes Update (2019-08-14): Thanks to Cory Knox ( twitter | github | twitch ) pointed out that $PSScriptRoot is not available in PS2. I wrote before … Continue reading "Dot Sourcing with PSScriptRoot"

В портале администрирования SharePoint Online мы можем указать как первичного администратора — Primary Admin, так и остальных администраторов в свойствах сайта. Давайте рассмотрим, как это сделать при помощи PowerShell. Пролог Для взамодействия с SharePoint Online через PowerShell, нам потребуется модуль… Читать далее →

When you work with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you often meet three versions on how those are stored in files - minified, formatted, somewhere in the middle (usually a total mess). I have all three versions in my PSWriteHTML module. Some are minified 3rd party resources, some are generated by my PowerShell commands (and are a total mess when it comes to formatting), and finally, some are formatted resources by using built-in VSCode features.