Richard Siddaway's Blog

Deal of the Day August 31: Half off my book Learn Active Directory Management in a Month of Lunches. Use code dotd083115au at https://manning.com/books/learn-active-directory-management-in-a-month-of-lunches Learn ConfigMgr 2012 in a Month of Lunches and Learn SQL Server Administration in a Month of Lunches also included

The UK PowerShell User Group was the World’s first user group dedicated to PowerShell. Its been in hibernation for the last few years but Ryan Yates is bringing it back to life.   He’s set up a meeting in Manchester for Tuesday 13 October 2016. See  http://www.kilasuit.org/Blog/Post/18/Coming-to-Manchester-October-13th—Get-PSUGUKMan for details.   If you’re in the area […]

The schedule for the PowerShell Summit Europe 2015 has been finalised.  See the event site at http://eventmgr.azurewebsites.net/event/home/PSEU15#schedule

There are a number of  concerns with pulling code from the Internet e.g. code quality and whether it contains malicious actions.   The PowerShell gallery has implemented a couple of features that should help.   All modules have to meet a minimum quality standard as outlined here -  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/08/07/powershell-gallery-new-security-scan.aspx   You can also use Save-Module […]

A question on the forum was asking about creating a JSON structure for use with a REST API. The original has table looked like this $body = @{ auth_token = "$auth_token" items = @{ label = "server1" value = "OK" label = "server2" value = "OK" } }   This fails because you can’t have […]

PowerShell jobs are a powerful tool for running processes in the background. You have to remember that a PowerShell job runs in a separate process that only exists for the duration of the job. The results are returned to your process when the job finishes.   A user on the forum asked about passing variables […]

The WinOps conference will take place 22 September 2015 in London.   Details from http://winops.org/   Its all about “Windows in a DevOps world”

if you were wondering where the PSScriptanalyzer module was in Windows 10 RTM  – its not there.  Its been moved out of core PowerShell and is now available on the PSGallery. £> Find-Module *Script* Version    Name                                Repository ——-    —-                                ———- 0.1        nScriptAnalyzerRules                PSGallery 1.0.2      PSScriptAnalyzer                    PSGallery 1.3.1.0    ScriptBrowser                       PSGallery 1.5.2.0    ScriptCop                           PSGallery 1.0.4.0    ScriptCS                            PSGallery […]

A question on the forum on how to stop the output from New-Item raises an important point. Many cmdlets produce output when run for example £> New-Item -Type File -Name test.txt     Directory: C:\Test2 Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name —-                ————-         —— —- -a—-       08/08/2015     14:14              0 test.txt   There are times when you want to […]

With the recent release of Windows 10 a lot of confusion has arisen regarding the position of PowerShell 5.0.   That confusion has been cleared up with a post from the PowerShell team – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/08/06/windows-management-framework-wmf-5-0-roadmap.aspx