Richard Siddaway's Blog

The recent announced project Honolulu – https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2017/09/22/project-honolulu-technical-preview-is-now-available-for-download/ – is Microsoft’s new browser based Server management tool.   You can install it on Windows 10, Windows Server 1709 and Windows Server 2016, 2012 R2 and 2012   Honolulu is the proposed replacement for the MMC based tools we’ve been using since Windows 2000.   Honolulu functions […]

Ask any number of users and you’ll get at least that many different answers but at its core PowerShell is an administration tool. To be effective your administration tools have to be able to access remote machines. RDP is the traditional way to do this for GUI bound admins – should that be the coding […]

There are a number of file extensions associated with PowerShell. If you’re not aware of them they may cause you problems. You’ll commonly find these PowerShell file extensions:   .ps1 – a PowerShell script. May contain functionality such as functions or workflows. This is the most common extension   .psm1 – a PowerShell module file. […]

DSC is a configuration management tool that first appeared in PowerShell v4 and was refined in PowerShell v5/5.1. Major changes are coming to DSC of which more later. DSC takes a configuration and applies it to a server. What about the situation where you have an existing server and want to derive a DSC configuration […]

PowerShell Attacks–advice on defending from Lee Holmes – PowerShell security expert – is available at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2017/10/23/defending-against-powershell-attacks/ Read, learn, inwardly digest and apply

The Windows 2016 1709 release is the first of the semi-annual updates for Windows Server – interestingly its referred to as Windows Server 1709 in the documentation.   Its now available for download through your Software Assurance channels and Windows evaluation centre. MSDN subscribers can also get a copy.   A big surprise is that […]

The Windows 10 fall Creators Update arrived this morning.   After the usual long download, install and then updating bits after I first log on (that last bit is really irritating – thought it was going away) I got into the machine.   First impression is that there are some minor cosmetic changes. Some icons […]

A question on the forum about getting monitor resolution led to this code Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName WmiMonitorId | foreach {      $filter = (“InstanceName = ‘$($psitem.InstanceName)'”).Replace(“`\”, “`\`\”)       $maxres = Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName WmiMonitorListedSupportedSourceModes -Filter $filter |   Select-Object -ExpandProperty MonitorSourceModes |   Sort-Object -Property {$_.HorizontalActivePixels * $_.VerticalActivePixels} -Descending |   […]

The schedule for the 2018 Summit still needs a little bit of polishing to finish it but it’s taking shape. I’ve started releasing information on sched.com that we’re using for all our scheduling needs for the Summit. The one and only truth regarding the sessions and their times can be found at https://powershelldevopsglobalsummit2018.sched.com/   I’ll […]

In August 2016 PowerShell went open source. Since then we’ve seen 18 releases of alpha code and 8 beta release with another beta release imminent. This post – https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2017/07/14/powershell-6-0-roadmap-coreclr-backwards-compatibility-and-more/ – from the PowerShell Team suggested a full release of PowerShell v6 before the end of 2017.   I’ve not written much about PowerShell v6 so […]