pwshguy

Announcements!

• PowerShell 7.4 General Availability
  PowerShell 7.4 GA has been released.

Blogs, Articles, and Posts

• Speeding up PowerShell module development with RestartableSession
  Let's assume you are developing a PowerShell module. You would add small modifications to the module and test if they work as expected iteratively. In each iteration, after you edit the module code, how do you test the modification?
• Security Update: PowerShell Universal CVE TBD
  Learn about CVE TBD in PowerShell Universal.
• Best Practices Make Perfect
  Over the last several weeks, I've been sharing and demonstrating techniques for writing effective PowerShell functions. I know I've mentioned a few recommended best practices. But since they are important, I want to review and re-emphasize them. These practices will make your code easier to write, debug or troubleshoot and more secure. I'd like to think some of them are simply common sense, but sometimes we need someone to remind us. These items are not in any particular order.
• Building a Notion PowerShell Module: Part 3
  Learn the next steps of building a PowerShell Notion module in this in-depth PowerShell tutorial by ATA Learning!
• Customizing the Microsoft 365 User Profile Card with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK
  This article describes how to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to customize the user account properties shown by the Microsoft 365 user profile card. Previously this was possible using a Graph API request to the beta endpoint. Now everything is in production and Graph SDK cmdlets are available to make customization a tad easier.
• PowerShell: Search for Empty Folders (and delete them)
  We live in times of Big Data. Too much data in too short a time. You may have empty folders in your environment and if you want to search for them
• Azure Arc-enabled servers: Automate scripts with Bicep & Azure DevOps
  Azure Arc empowers you to extend Azure management and services to any infrastructure. One powerful way to leverage Azure Arc is by automating script execution
• Using Power Automate and Azure Automation to Manage the Lifecycle of SharePoint Sites
  A key aspect of a well-managed Microsoft 365 environment is to ensure that SharePoint sites are removed when they are no longer needed. In this blog, Sean McAvinue explores how to combine relatively basic PowerShell and Azure Automation skills with Power Automate to create a clean, robust way to manage the lifecycle of SharePoint sites in your Microsoft 365 tenant.

Projects, Scripts, and Modules

• PSZoom v 2.0.4.2
  A collection of Powershell tools to interface with the Zoom Api.
• Get Microsoft 365 License Usage Count Using PowerShell
  Keeping an eye on the available licenses in your Microsoft tenant is essential to ensuring you and your users have what is needed to keep the business running. Whether you assign licenses directly or you use Group Based Licensing

Community

• Emil Larsson: Creating Communal Tech Waves with PowerShell
  In this episode of the PowerShell Podcast, we had Emil Larsson join us! We had a healthy amount of community blogs in this episode, with lots of great conversation all throughout. We discussed how helpful contributing to PowerShell docs can be. We learned about Emil's evolution with PowerShell and how the industry has changed in his 10+ years of experience. Emil and Andrew revisited their early IT days of grappling with upgrades from Windows XP to Windows 7, making all of us a bit nostalgic. We also had a fair bit of discussion around what the PowerShell community is all about.

Fun

• Happy 17th Birthday PowerShell - Ed Tittel
  On November 14, 2023, I wish "Happy 17th Birthday PowerShell" to express my thanks for this powerful, flexible open source command line.
• What are some of the coolest things you've built outside of your job?
  As in, things for personal use or personal projects you've created?

Check out psweekly.dowst.dev for all past editions as well as a searchable archive.

If you are like me and have multiple machines you work on with different profiles, it can be difficult to remember which profile contains which functions. So, I wrote a quick function that will display all the functions for me on start up.

Azure Automation Run As Account will retire on September 30, 2023 and will be replaced with Managed Identities. Before that date, you'll need to migrate your runbooks to use managed identities.

However, just the presence of a Run As account doesn’t mean a it is being used. Often these were just created during the automation account provisioning. This script help to determine if you are using the Run As account by search through the runbooks to find references to the Run As Account actually being called. Then finds the last time the runbook was executed. If no date is returned, then the runbook has not executed in the last 30 days.

I was looking at code.golf the other day and I wondered which languages were the least verbose, so I did a little data gathering.

I looked at 48 different languages that had completed 79 different code challenges on code.golf. I then gathered the results for each language and challenge. If a "golfer" had more than 1 submission to a challenge, I grabbed the most recent one. I then dropped the top 5% and bottom 5% to hopefully mitigate most outliers. Then came up with an average for each language, for each challenge. I then averaged the results across each language and that is what you see here.

For another perspective, I ranked each challenge then got the average ranking across all challenges. Below is the results of that.

Disclaimer: This is in no way scientific. It's just for fun. If you know of a better way to sort these results please let me know.

Enums were introduced to PowerShell in version 5.0 and can be used as a simple way to validate script and parameter input.

Go beyond comment-based help. Bring your own module and learn how to create the documentation to support it.

Announcements!

• Desired State Configuration (DSC) Planning Update
  A fun and informative blog post sharing the exciting plans and roadmap for Desired State Configuration (DSC), including plans for compatibility, transparency, cross-platform support, and more.

Blogs, Articles, and Posts

• Find enabled local Group Policy settings with rsop.msc and PowerShell
  When it comes to GPO troubleshooting, you might want to find settings that are configured by local Group Policy. With rsop.msc, a graphical tool is available for this purpose. However, it is generally more efficient to generate a report using gpresult.exe and evaluate it with PowerShell.
• Your Getting Started Guide to PowerShell Approved Verbs
  Discover how to get started with PowerShell Approved Verbs to make sure your scripts and code is top-notch in this ATA Learning tutorial!
• How to optimize and speed up your PowerShell scripts
  My best practices, tips and tricks working with PowerShell This is a blog post that is not deeply technical. I will not go deep into the tips and tricks, because you will learn this automatically when you have more experience & when you are ready. I have a seperate blog post about best practices, tips … Continue reading How to optimize and speed up your PowerShell scripts
• PowerShell Advanced Functions: Cmdlet Bindings and Parameters
  Part 1 of this series on advanced PowerShell functions introduces the key concepts, including cmdlet bindings and common parameters like ErrorAction.

Projects, Scripts, and Modules

• Announcing PowerShell Crescendo 1.1.0-RC1
  This RC contains several community requested features and fixes including improved support for PSScriptAnalyzer, improvements to error handling, and the addition of ExcludeAsArgument property.
• Using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to Generate a Mailbox Traffic Report
  Microsoft 365 makes it easy for administrators to get mail activity usage data for users. However, if you want to know which domains are sending most mail, you need to do some work. In this article, we cover how to use cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to create reports about user mail activity over time and the traffic sent by different domains.
• ServerCertificateValidationCallback (or rather, collector) for .NET Core
  ServerCertificateValidationCallback (or rather, collector) for .NET Core - Get-WebCertificate.ps1
• About Colors.md
  When I'm having a bad day, I can spend hours just fiddling with colors and recursion. Today I wrote an HslEnumerator class which is fun because if you output it to the PowerShell terminal it just goes on producing colors forever:
• Get-AadJoinInformation.ps1
  Get Azure AD (Entra ID) Join Information without dsregcmd

Books, Media, and Learning Resources

• From Cloud to Console: Harm Veenstra’s PowerShell Perspectives
  We had a cool chat with Harm Veenstra, the guy behind powershellisfun.com. We got into some neat PowerShell stuff like Out-ConsoleGridView and the -PassThru parameter. Harm also gave us the lowdown on when to quit the cloud and spilled the beans on running his blog. Plus, he shared how he keeps up with the quick mojo of the tech world. Tune in for a fun and laid-back tech talk!

Community

• Unlocking PowerShell Magic: Different Approach to Creating ‘Empty’ PSCustomObjects
  Today I saw an article from Christian Ritter, "PowerShell: Creating an "empty" PSCustomObject" on X that got me curious. Do people create empty objects like Christian proposes? I want to offer an alternative to Christian's article, which uses OrderedDictionary and converts to PSCustomObject.
• Simplifying Creation of Empty PowerShell PSCustomObjects using Custom Functions
  Creating an empty PSCustomObject in PowerShell is a common task, but the traditional approach can be verbose and repetitive. In this blog post, I'll walk you through a more structured and efficient way to achieve this using functions and property definitions.

Fun

• PSQuizMaster
  A module for creating and running quizzes to learn PowerShell - GitHub - jdhitsolutions/PSQuizMaster: A module for creating and running quizzes to learn PowerShell

Check out psweekly.dowst.dev for all past editions as well as a searchable archive.

Blogs, Articles, and Posts

• Create a Hyper-V VM to run pfSense with a PowerShell script
  In this blog post, you’ll learn how to use a PowerShell script to create a Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) toContinue Reading
• Function cannot be created because function capacity 4096 has been exceeded for this scope
  I had a long day today when my long-running script (10 hours) gave me weird errors with Microsoft Graph for Teams. Finally, I solved my mistakes and reran the hand to see if the report would be complete this time. Surprisingly, it gave me an error I'd never seen before. "Function cannot be created because function capacity 4096 has been exceeded for this scope". The error is at least weird because it's shown on a production server where I've just a handful of PowerShell modules installed, and I've never seen it on my development machine where I've over 200 modules.
• Things I use most in my PowerShell scripts
  Looking back at the scripts I created the last year, certain things always come back in most of them. In this blog post, I will show you a few and explain them.
• Find Who Created a User Account in Microsoft 365 | Audit User Creations 
  In Microsoft 365, user accounts act as gateways to access resources. Unauthorized or suspicious user creations can lead to severe consequences, such as data breaches and compromises in sensitive information. Admins play a critical role in safeguarding organizational data by […]
• Ask Jeff July 2023
  Well, this has been a whirlwind month. I hope you accomplished much and still had time to learn a thing or two. As has been the custom here, let’s wrap up with grab bag of tips and suggestions.

Projects, Scripts, and Modules

• Programmatically generate resource names with Bicep and Azure Naming Tool V2
  RIf you’ve ever found yourself exhausted from manually using the aznaming tool through the UI to generate resource names, fret not! I’ve been there, and...
• PowerShell: Report On-Premises Active Directory Accounts that are Synchronized with Azure AD Connect
  Organizations that subscribe to Microsoft 365 and also have on-premises IT infrastructure, tend to synchronize accounts from their local Active
• Text 2 Video Narrator
  This PowerShell script allows you to create videos from specially formatted text files using Amazon Polly for text-to-speech conversion. The script reads the input text file, generates PowerPoint slides with appropriate content, and then exports them as video files. The process involves the use of AWS Polly for voice synthesis and the AWS CLI configured with a user having rights to Polly.
• One-Liner Wednesday August 2, 2023
  Have you ever needed to create multiple 365 Groups/Security/Distribution at one time?
• Powershell Scripts for Hackers and Pentesters
  Basic of Windows Systems (history, methods , tricks) Windows Pentest Methods, Common ports/services, Basic commands Scipts (Ping-Play, Enumeration, Silent Installer) and more
• Azure Blob Storage Archive and Rehydration Management
  I've developed a PowerShell Module for managing the rehydration process of archived blobs in Azure. This script allows you to verify the status of blobs listed in a given file, determine whether they are in an 'Archive' state, and provides visibility on their rehydration status.
• PowerBits
  A collection of useful, time-saving tools for working with Microsoft Power BI

Community

• Björn Sundling. From PowerShell Developer to MVP: An Unfiltered Journey
  In our latest PowerShell Podcast, we invited Microsoft MVP Björn Sundling,  on a riveting journey from being a PowerShell developer to securing Azure DevOps repositories. With a passion for speaking seeded from his first year at PSConfEU 2015, his road to the podium wasn’t easy. The podcast was peppered with a detailed discussion on the automated scanner project PSSecretScanner. Offering insights into development technologies, this episode is a whirlwind tour of community involvement and encompasses his love of sharing knowledge.

Fun

• Become the TEC 2023 PowerShell Script-Off Champion
  The TEC 2023 PowerShell Challenge Champion will be known after three rounds of frenetic script coding at The Experts Conference in Atlanta on September 19, 2023. Competitors will need a working knowledge of Microsoft 365 PowerShell, including Exchange Online, Teams, and Azure AD. Being able to think on your feet and come up with working solutions to problems is possibly a more important attribute than coding genius.

Events

• Experts Line Australia
  September 19-20 - Early bird pricing ends Aug 9th

Check out psweekly.dowst.dev for all past editions as well as a searchable archive.

Blogs, Articles, and Posts

• Reconnecting Pages with Language Variations After Copying Them with ShareGate
  Have you ever copied pages with language variations using ShareGate and ended up with a mess? Don’t worry, check out my blog post to learn how to reconnect your pages with PowerShell in a snap.
• Microsoft Office 365: How to disable the automatic creation of Online Meetings in Outlook
  In this blog post I will show how to disable the automatic creation of an online meeting in Outlook. The default behavior is the following:
• Check if TPM chip is present and enabled and retrieve version with PowerShell
  A Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip is a specialized hardware component that provides security-related functions and serves as a secure root of trust for a computing system. It is a microcontroller that is integrated into a computer’s motherboard or added as a discrete component.
• PowerShell Out-ConsoleGridView and F7History
  I saw these two console tools for PowerShell in my newsfeed, and I like them :) This blog post will show you what they are and how they work.
• Automate Backups for Azure Table Storage with Azure Function App
  If you’ve ever used Azure Table Storage you’ve probably wondered – where is the backup option?!! I mean, you can back up SQL server or NoSQL databases, and you can back up storage blobs and Azure files, so why not table storage? Microsoft do not provide any native backup solution for Azure table storage
• 10 Popular PowerShell Tips and Tricks in 2023
  This midyear roundup of our most-read PowerShell articles contains tutorials and best practices.
• Implementing a Code Search: Indexing Git Repositories using PowerShell (Part 2)
  This article shows how to use Elasticsearch and ASP.NET Core to implement a Code Search Service.

Projects, Scripts, and Modules

• One-Liner Wednesday July 26, 2023
  Ever needed to check a computer or server and see how much disk space is being used?
• Orchestrating 1Password with PowerShell
  Over two years ago I authored a PowerShell Module that enabled the automation of 1Password. I created the module because I wanted to be able to:
• Unveiling a new version of M365Documentation PowerShell Module: Creating Markdown Documentation with Ease
  The Microsoft 365 community has a reason to rejoice as a new release of the M365Documentation PowerShell module was published PowerShellGallery.com. With the latest update, users can now create comprehensive documentation in Markdown format, complete with an intuitive table of contents. This feature has been highly anticipated and requested by Read more
• PS Protector: PowerShell Module Builder
  PS Protector is a small Windows utility that simplifies converting your PowerShell .psm module file(s) into Windows .NET dynamic-link library (DLL) assemblies.

Books, Media, and Learning Resources

• PowerShell Automation and Scripting for CyberSecurity: Hacking and Defense for Red and Blue Teamers
  Take your cybersecurity skills to the next level with this comprehensive guide to PowerShell security! Whether you're a red or blue teamer, you'll gain a deep understanding of PowerShell's security capabilities and how to use them.

Community

• Culture, Mentoring, and Tech: A Talk with Glen Sarti
  In this episode of the PowerShell Podcast, Glen leads us on the journey of his wide-ranging career, sharing stories about his beginnings in the Powershell world and addressing his brave decision to move across the globe for his dreams. He unravels the complex world of DevOps, recounts experiences from his first talk on “DevOps, Desktop, and Odd Socks,” and offers valuable insights into building effective mentoring relationships. At the heart of the episode is his take on driving cultural change within organizations and his compelling comparison of technical versus social skills in the tech industry. This episode encapsulates numerous nuggets of wisdom from Glen, adding value and insights for listeners at all stages of their tech career.

Fun

• Posh v0.1.1
  Posh is a PowerShell module that makes PowerShell more fun to work with.

Check out psweekly.dowst.dev for all past editions as well as a searchable archive.

Some of my favorites:

• Chocolatey
• PSScriptTools
• Intune Documentation