In my experience splatting is one of those often overlooked and underutilized features of PowerShell. Full disclosure, I don’t use it regularly myself. Most times I just forget it’s a thing. For those that are new to PowerShell, splatting looks more difficult than it really is. The whole idea...
Powershell
Visual Studio Code and Azure DevOps (formerly VisualStudio.com) Integration Step-by-Step
My previous video walked through the process of using the old Visual Studio Team Services VS Code extension. That extension has now been deprecated. With the latest version or VS Code (I installed v 1.28.1) you should see the Azure Repos extension baked into VS Code. The only other...
Enterprise Security: How to configure and use Group Managed Service Accounts
I routinely see organizations big and small still using “regular” Active Directory user accounts as service accounts. Typically, they have the password for those service accounts set to never expire or an alternate password policy that only requires the password is changed yearly. If your organization is managing service...
Quickly deploy LAB Virtual Machines with the AutomatedLab PowerShell Framework
My Requirements: Use PowerShell to minimize the time spent on creating VMs. Install ADDS along with the VM creation. Use a differencing disk for all the VMs to save disk space. In the spirit of kickstarting this channel again, I needed to spin up a few Virtual Machines to...
Advanced Auditing with PowerShell Desired State Configuration Manager (DSC)
Greetings interweb. It’s been a while but I’m back with a new video finally. This video focuses on Desired State Configuration Manager (DSC) and how to configure Advanced Auditing using DSC. You can certainly configure DSC using a group policy object (GPO). My use case for this is if...
Hey PowerShell… Text me if my Domain Admins Group changes
This is why I Love PowerShell… It’s simple, yet functional. From an Administrative perspective, I think we can all agree that any changes in your Domain Admins group without your knowledge would be of interest to you. If you’re in a large organization with access to enterprise management tools...
Enable PowerShell Remoting to an Azure Virtual Machine, without Domain Membership
I recently started an Azure subscription in order to move all the servers I use to test PowerShell code to the cloud. Right now I have only a couple Virtual Machines, one running Windows Server 2016, that’s my Domain Controller. I also have a Windows Server 2012 R2 Virtual...
Basic and Advanced Filtering of PowerShell Objects using Where-Object
This is a very minimal introduction into filtering pipeline objects using Where-Object and comparison operators. This video will give you the syntax and a simple example. To unleash the full capabilities of comparison operators take a look at the help file. # Basic Syntax example Get-Service | Where-Object Status...
PowerShell Quicktip #2: Filter-Left
A practical example of why you should filter as far left in your scripts as possible. It might matter. #1 Get-Service | Where-object { $_.Status -eq 'Running' -and $_.name -like 's*'} #2 Get-Service -name s*| Where-object { $_.Status -eq 'Running'} #1 Measure-Command -Expression {Get-Service | Where-object { $_.Status -eq...
PowerShell Basics: Sorting and Selecting Objects with Sort-Object and Select-Object
# Selecting #Default Get-Process # All Properties Get-Process | Select-Object -Property * | Out-GridView # Sorting # Changes the default sorting order for Get-Process Get-Process | Sort-Object CPU # Minimize the data and sort Get-Process | Select-Object ProcessName, CPU | Sort-Object CPU -Descending ## Caution # Mission: Get...