Richard Siddaway's Blog

We will be getting extra capacity for the PowerShell Summit NA 2015 in Charlotte. The extra places should become available 11 January 2015 – see http://powershell.org/wp/2014/12/30/powershell-summit-n-a-2015-additional-capacity/   for details.  Please check the powershell.org site for further news

See my review of 2014 from a PowerShell perspective on the Scripting Guy blog – http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2014/12/31/2014-a-powershell-year-in-perspective.aspx

My recent post on date conversions seems to have generated a fair bit of confusion and discussion. The original task was to read in a string from a CSV file that contained a date in UK format – DD/MM/YYYY and reformat it to a string is US format – MM/DD/YYYY   As I showed you […]

A comment on this post -  http://richardspowershellblog.wordpress.com/2014/12/29/using-givenname-and-surname-instead-of-samaccountname/ suggested using ANR – Ambiguous Name Resolution as a method of searching AD.   ANR provides a fuzzy search mechanism for AD – think wildcard search. If you perform an ANR search you’ll get anything matches – using your input as the root of the wildcard search – […]

A recent comment on this post – https://richardspowershellblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2762&action=edit – asked about using the given name and surname rather than the samAccountName in Get-ADUser. Get-ADUser has 4 options when using the –Identity parameter: Account name = samAccountNmae Distinguished Name GUID Security identifier = SID. Using the given name and surname. on the surface doesn’t seem possible […]

Saw a question regarding the conversion of dates in UK format DD/MM/YYYY to US format MM/DD/YYYY   Using 25 December 2014 as an example If you have a dat in US format you can do this £> $sd = ’12/25/2014′ £> $d = [datetime]$sd £> $d 25 December 2014 00:00:00   $d = [datetime]$sd   creates […]

The PowerShell team have produced wave 9 of the DSc resource kit – just in time for Christmas – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2014/12/17/another-holiday-present-from-the-powershell-team-dsc-reskit-wave-9.aspx This wave contains a number of new resources and some updates to existing resources including the Exchange resource. You can download the latest version of the resource kit from  https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/DSC-Resource-Kit-All-c449312d The team’s blog post states […]

The call for topics for the European PowerShell Summit is still open – http://powershell.org/wp/2014/11/24/call-for-presentations-for-powershell-summit-europe-2015/ Please submit your topics by the deadline of 11 January 2015.   A few people have suggested subjects for topics they would like to see: Azure automation with SAM and/or workflows SCCM advanced scripting DSC advanced scripting Pester Test Driven Deployment […]

Step one of investigating OneGet and PowerShellGet – install the latest preview.  I have the environment I used for the demos at the European PowerShell Summit with a machine set up for DSC. Its currently running the September preview: £> $PSVersionTable Name                           Value —-                           —– PSVersion                      5.0.9814.0 WSManStackVersion              3.0 SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1 CLRVersion                     4.0.30319.34014 BuildVersion                   6.4.9814.0 […]

Saw a question on the forums about selecting name properties using the Microsoft AD cmdlets.  By default Get-AdUser returns a limited subset of properties: £> Get-ADUser -identity richard DistinguishedName : CN=Richard,CN=Users,DC=Manticore,DC=org Enabled           : True GivenName         : Name              : Richard ObjectClass       : user ObjectGUID        : 7c42be70-c6b2-401f-8296-46de9ee7446c SamAccountName    : Richard SID               : S-1-5-21-195014076-723736408-1406369008-1104 Surname           : UserPrincipalName : […]