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August 28, 2020

Announcements!

Configuration Manager cmdlet library changes for version 2006 (docs.microsoft.com)
These release notes summarize changes to the Configuration Manager cmdlet library in version 2006.
By: Config Manager submitted:Jun 16 2022

Get PowerShell Preview – Microsoft Store (microsoft.com)
PowerShell is now in the Microsoft Store!
By: PowerShell Team submitted:Jun 16 2022

Windows Terminal Preview 1.3 Release (devblogs.microsoft.com)
We are back with another release for Windows Terminal and Windows Terminal Preview! This release

adds all of the 1.2 features into Windows Terminal and introduces new features described below for Windows Terminal Preview 1.3. Both builds of Windows Terminal can be installed from the Microsoft Store or from the GitHub releases page. Let's check out what's new this month!

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By: Kayla Cinnamon submitted:Jun 16 2022

Blogs, Articles, and Posts

Azure PowerShell releases demystified (techcommunity.microsoft.com)
Have you ever wondered why Az.Compute has a different version than the Az module or why a module had

documentation but is not available in Cloud Shell?

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By: The Azure PowerShell team submitted:Jun 16 2022

How to use PowerShell for DNS Records (adamtheautomator.com)
DNS records are typically managed dynamically by your DNS server. However, at times, you may find

that you need to manually create, edit, or remove various types of DNS records. Or to even add various DNS tasks to automation scripts. It is at times like this that using PowerShell for DNS records is the way to go.

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By: David Lamb submitted:Jun 16 2022

Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring legacy authentication logons (cyberdrain.com)
So Microsoft has announced a while back that legacy authentication is no longer going to be

supported, due to COVID we had some extra time to prepare our clients for this change as its been postponed to July of 2021. We've helped all of our clients move to modern authentication last year but I understood there is still a bit of a struggle for other MSPs to achieve this.

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By: Kelvin Tegelaar submitted:Jun 16 2022

Reading SCCM Logs with PowerShell (tseknet.com)
SCCM log files follow a standard schema that we can use to parse these log files for the data we're

interested in (timestamp, log data, etc.). Once we've separated the important bits, we can do whatever we'd like with that data. In this case, let's dive in on how we can write those logs to the Event Log for later forensic investigation.

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By: Dan Tsekhanskiy submitted:Jun 16 2022

Projects, Scripts, and Modules

Mailozaurr (github.com)
Mailozaurr is a PowerShell module that aims to provide SMTP, POP3, IMAP and few other ways to

interact with Email.

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By: Przemyslaw Klys submitted:Jun 16 2022

Books, Media, and Learning Resources

Azure Automation Runbooks & State Configuration (youtube.com)
In this video Mike Pfeiffer shows you how to get started with Azure Automation runbooks and state

configuration with PowerShell DSC.

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By: CloudSkills submitted:Jun 16 2022

PowerShell Conference Book by Mark Kraus et al. [PDF/iPad/Kindle] (leanpub.com)
20+ subject matter experts have teamed up to bring you the ultimate collection of PowerShell+DevOps

topics that are designed to be like a conference in a book. This book not only delivers top-notch content that rivals any book on the market, but all royalties are donated to the OnRamp scholarship program which bootstraps others into the..

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By: Mark Kraus submitted:Jun 16 2022

Do you have a suggestion for PowerShell Weekly? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on
twitter.

August 21, 2020

Announcements!

PowerShell 7.1 Preview 6 (devblogs.microsoft.com)
Further in this blog post I'll provide details on some important changes you should be aware of as

you starting trying out this preview.

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By: Steve Lee submitted:Jun 16 2022

PowerShell support in Durable Functions is in public preview (azure.microsoft.com)
Durable Functions, an extension to Azure Functions that lets you define stateful serverless

workflows, now supports PowerShell. Common scenarios made possible by Durable Functions include orchestrating the management of complex Azure Resource deployments involving sequential and parallel steps. Long-running workflows are supported, and Durable Functions provides built-in HTTP endpoints for monitoring their progress.

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By: Microsoft submitted:Jun 16 2022

Blogs, Articles, and Posts

Cut and Paste Between Worksheets in Excel using Powershell (reddit.com)
Yesterday I posted here asking if anyone knew how to cut and paste between two worksheets in an

excel file. I never really got a response with a solution. I finally figured it out and wanted to share.

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By: u/gregj529 submitted:Jun 16 2022

How to Manage Microsoft Teams via PowerShell (techcommunity.microsoft.com)
Microsoft Teams usage has increased greatly during the current pandemic. All types of organizations

are using the communications tool to stay connected with its employees and customers alike. The increase of use has also resulted in an increase of demand of system administrator's time to manage Microsoft Teams. Everything from adding users and groups to managing policies of said users and groups can be managed via PowerShell. This post will highlight the foundations to get started and provide links to continue your automation through script writing journey.

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By: Anthony Bartolo submitted:Jun 16 2022

How to Send Email Securely with PowerShell (adamtheautomator.com)
Need to notify your team on a failed service, only to find that your PowerShell email has bounced?

Unauthenticated email has become difficult to pass in many mail systems. You don't want to miss an important email notification because you relied on outdated PowerShell cmdlets. The built-in cmdlet Send-MailMessage no longer covers sending email securely.

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By: Adam Listek submitted:Jun 16 2022

Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring O365 alerts (cyberdrain.com)
So today we're tackling two blogs in one again, we're going to be focussing on two different types

of alerting policies. The first getting alerts for M365 or Azure P1/P2 users via the Graph API, these alerts are pretty cool as you can see if users are connecting from tor nodes/VPN nodes, or from stuff like malware linked IPs. Monitoring these alerts actively via your RMM helps you in making sure that users are as safe as they can be.

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By: Kelvin Tegelaar submitted:Jun 16 2022

Responding to an Issue Submitted for the PoShDynDnsApi Module (powershell.anovelidea.org)
The curtains are pulled back in this look behind-the-scenes where I respond to the first

public-submitted issue for PoShDynDnsApi.

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By: Dave Carroll submitted:Jun 16 2022

Projects, Scripts, and Modules

Total system update of windows 10 and dev apps (reddit.com)
My fellow geeks, I made a script to update my whole Windows system software, including: Windows

Store Apps, Windows 10 (OS itself), Visual Studio Community 2019, Chocolatey, Anaconda, MSYS2

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By: u/banzr submitted:Jun 16 2022

Windows10Debloater (github.com)
Script to remove Windows 10 bloatware.
By: Richard Newton submitted:Jun 16 2022

Fun

Using PowerShell for Lazy Maths (nocolumnname.blog)
I was asked today if I could figure out how many ways I could arrange the following equation to get

the number 18?

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By: Shane O'Neill submitted:Jun 16 2022

Do you have a suggestion for PowerShell Weekly? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on
twitter.

August 14, 2020

Announcements!

Azure Functions: PowerShell 7 support is now generally available (azure.microsoft.com)
Azure Functions support for PowerShell 7 is now generally available. This enables developing and

deploying Azure Functions Apps for production scenarios using the latest version of PowerShell.

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By: Microsoft submitted:Jun 16 2022

Pester v5.0.3 Released (github.com)
t fixes some of the scoping issues with the top level BeforeAll. It should now not leave functions

and variables behind. It still leaves $script: scoped variables behind but I am researching how to fix that.

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By: Jakub Jares submitted:Jun 16 2022

Blogs, Articles, and Posts

Analyzing Azure Active Directory Sign-In Data with PowerShell (petri.com)
The Azure Active Directory PowerShell module (now renamed the Azure Active Directory PowerShell for

Graph module) comes in two versions. The general availability version is intended for production while the preview version (AzureADPreview) contains the cmdlets from the general availability version plus some new cmdlets under development group. The current version of the AzureADPreview module is 2.0.2.105, released in July.

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By: Tony Redmond submitted:Jun 16 2022

Automating with PowerShell: Increasing the O365 Secure Score (cyberdrain.com)
At the start of this week I've blogged about reading the secure score and documenting it. This is of

course just one part of the new beta Secure Score module. The next one is actually the more fun part; applying the correct security settings to a tenant.

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By: Kelvin Tegelaar submitted:Jun 16 2022

Documenting with PowerShell: Office 365 Secure Score PowerShell module (cyberdrain.com)
A while back I wrote a blog about the Secure Score and how to increase it. After that blog I got a

lot more questions about documenting Secure Score with the Secure Application model.

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By: Kelvin Tegelaar submitted:Jun 16 2022

Handle timeouts while scripting with the microsoft cloud (or anywhere else) (blog.it-koehler.com)
If you found this article maybe you are struggling slowness of the Microsoft cloud (or some other

products) and your script fails because it does not find the newly created object. Yeah that's a big issue especially in the wonderful cloud, and if you want to automate tasks. So I invested some time to script this issue, which is not really difficult. It may help others during scripting.

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By: Alexander Koehler submitted:Jun 16 2022

Set the resolution and get the scale of each monitor, even in WinPE (someguy100.wixsite.com)
Why oh why should such a simple thing as setting (or getting) the resolution or scale of a monitor

be such a pain in the ****?

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By: Mattias Cedervall submitted:Jun 16 2022

Testing ARM Templates (4bes.nl)
In previous blog posts, I showed how you can test and deploy your ARM templates through Azure DevOps

and GitHub Actions. I mentioned one way to test ARM templates in a pipeline there (the WhatIf module). But there are other options available. And how about testing locally? In this post we will look at different tools that can help you with testing ARM templates.

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By: submitted:Jun 16 2022

The Grep of PowerShell (adamtheautomator.com)
One of the first Linux commands that many system administrators learn is grep. This venerable tool

has been around for decades and is crucial to any administrators toolbelt. Grep's core is simply the ability to search plain text for a RegEx pattern. Grep can search files in a given directory or streamed input to output matches.

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By: Adam Listek submitted:Jun 16 2022

Visual Studio Code – Useful Extensions (reddit.com)
Here are some extensions for Visual Studio code I've either found myself or a friendco-worker told

me about, and why the extensions have been useful so far from a PowerShell perspective.

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By: u/jevans_ submitted:Jun 16 2022

Wouldn’t it be cool to get that report through PowerShell/Graph API? (alexholmeset.blog)
In the Microsoft Teams admin portal you have several interesting reports. You can run the reports

and download as a csv. Then after import downloading, you could import the csv into PowerShell to play with the data. Wouldnt it be better to get these data directly into PowerShell? What if you want only a portion of the data, or want any of the others reports there?

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By: Alexander Holmeset submitted:Jun 16 2022

Projects, Scripts, and Modules

Get Direct Reports in Active Directory Using Powershell (Recursive) (thesysadminchannel.com)
It might come in handy from time to time to drill down on a manager's direct reports in Active

Directory. A good use case is if a director or VP wants to send an email to all of their direct reports, and the direct reports of those direct reports. Another use case would be if you were doing an audit comparing your HR system to what is in Active Directory. What ever the reason might be, you can use this script to get direct reports in active directory using Powershell. Pretty neat!!

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By: theSysadminChannel submitted:Jun 16 2022

Books, Media, and Learning Resources

Configuring PowerShell Remoting Security & Logging (networkadm.in)
Last week I gave a presentation on configuring PowerShell remoting security and logging for my user

group. This talk focused on how to properly setup remoting security and logging options. I talk briefly about how remoting works with some simple examples of what a real-world remoting connection looks like.

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By: Mike Kanakos submitted:Jun 16 2022

Fun

A PowerShell Nonsense Challenge (jdhitsolutions.com)
Today I thought I'd share my PowerShell solution to a recent Iron Scripter challenge. The challenge

was to create PowerShell code that would create nonsense documents, with a goal of creating 10 sample files filled with gibberish.

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By: Jeff Hicks submitted:Jun 16 2022

Get-WhatToEat (reddit.com)
Because sometime i don't know what i'm going to order...
By: u/Bugibugi submitted:Jun 16 2022

Do you have a suggestion for PowerShell Weekly? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on
twitter.

August 7, 2020

Announcements!

Semantic Highlighting in the PowerShell Preview extension for Visual Studio Code (devblogs.microsoft.com)
Hi everyone! I'm Justin and I am currently an intern on the PowerShell team. One of my projects was

to add PowerShell semantic highlighting support in VS Code allowing for more accurate highlighting in the editor. I'm excited to share that the first iteration has been released.

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By: Justin Chen submitted:Jun 16 2022

Blogs, Articles, and Posts

AWS Custom Config Rule backed by PowerShell (bgelens.nl)
AWS Config Rules allow you to evaluate the configuration settings of AWS resources during creation,

update, deletions of such resources or on a schedule. They are used to audit resources for compliance with some defined policy. They don't prevent you from deploying in-compliant resources as this is the realm of service control policies.

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By: Ben Gelens submitted:Jun 16 2022

Convert .ps1 Files to .exe Files (sid-500.com)
Have you ever dreamed of creating exe files out of your PowerShell scripts? If yes, read on. In this

post I will show you how you can create exe files with a small and simple program called ps2exe.

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By: Patrick Gruenauer submitted:Jun 16 2022

Doing More with Windows Sandbox (jdhitsolutions.com)
One of the reasons I was looking forward to updating to Windows 10 2004 was to have access to the

Windows Sandbox feature. I think I tinkered with a pre-release version and was intrigued. I normally have a set of Hyper-V virtual machines that I can test with, but I'm always looking for something new to play with. And what is better to play with than a sand box!

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By: Jeff Hicks submitted:Jun 16 2022

How to Find Active Directory Schema Update History by Using PowerShell (devblogs.microsoft.com)
Use Windows PowerShell to discover what schema updates have been applied to your Active Directory

environment.

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By: Dr Scripto submitted:Jun 16 2022

Projects, Scripts, and Modules

DSC resource platform changes to use JSON instead of MOF (github.com)
As we continue to make DSC more viable cross-platform, we have a serious problem with MOF. MOF

parsing is provided by MMI.dll (there is both native code and managed code). MMI itself has dependency on OpenSSL 1.0 for the WSMan features. The non-Windows build of MMI is no longer supported and has been deprecated.

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By: Steve Lee submitted:Jun 16 2022

Optimize-WsusServer.PS1 (github.com)
Comprehensive Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) cleanup, optimization, maintenance, and

configuration PowerShell script.

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By: Austin submitted:Jun 16 2022

Books, Media, and Learning Resources

Chicago PowerShell Conference – Jeffrey Snover – Keynote + Q&A (youtube.com)
This year's Chicago PowerShell Conference is a virtual one as the United States grapples with the

Coronavirus pandemic. Our keynote speaker, delivering what is one of the most endearing keynotes ever seen, is Jeffrey Snover--who prerecorded the Keynote itself but surprised us all by doing a live Q&A afterwards!

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By: Chicago PowerShell submitted:Jun 16 2022

Module Monday: ImportExcel (youtube.com)
This Monday, I looked at ImportExcel. ImportExcel is a PowerShell module for manipulating Excel

files. You don't even need Excel installed. It's super cool!

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By: Adam Driscoll submitted:Jun 16 2022

Windows PowerShell Toolmaking Fundamentals (pluralsight.com)
Are you a beginning to intermediate PowerShell scripter and tired of writing one-off scripts? Take

your scripting to the next level and begin to think of your scripts as tools.

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By: Adam Bertram submitted:Jun 16 2022

Fun

A stupid little animation script (reddit.com)
Maybe it could be used while background stuff is happening, idk.
By: u/akaBrotherNature submitted:Jun 16 2022

Do you have a suggestion for PowerShell Weekly? Do you know something that should be included? Let me know in the comments below, or on
twitter.

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