ICYMI: PowerShell Week of 16-November-2018
Topics include pie charts, flattening your modules, selecting unique items, the WindowsCompatibility module goes GA, and more…
Curated by Brett Bunker, Robin Dadswell, and Mark Roloff
Convert PowerShell output into a pie chart
by Graham Beer on November 9th
Piping information to CSVs and turning it into pretty tables or charts with Excel seems like a staple of admin work sometimes. Lucky for us, Graham has worked out a function for quickly creating pie charts from PowerShell data. Display them right away for a quick visualization or save them to file for use later, and if you dig into the function a little you might find a way to generate even more chart types.
Azure Blueprint
by Axel Anderson on November 11th
Blueprint is an interesting new tool in the world of Azure; it pretty much works to orchestrate policies, roles, ARM templates, and resource groups across multiple subscriptions. Axel’s blog post gives a brief introduction to this service before jumping into a module that he wrote for applying a little automation around it.
Create custom reports using the updated Teams PowerShell module
by Steve Goodman on November 12th
Teams is soon replacing Skype for Business and it’s PowerShell module is slowly coming into its own. A recent update added in a little extra functionality and Steve decided to explore that by showing us a handy script to assist with auditing Teams in a tenant.
PowerShell – Single PSM1 file versus multi-file modules
by Przemyslaw Klys on November 16th
Flattening your modules into a single file before deploying to the PowerShell Gallery seems to be trending a bit. Przemyslaw tested the idea on one of his modules that previously took 12 seconds to load. Now? Less than 1 second. To call that impressive would be putting it mildly.
Announcing General Availability of the Windows Compatibility Module 1.0.0
by Steve Lee on November 15th
After a lot of hard work, the WindowsCompatibility module is now GA! This bad boy (slaps module) will let PS Core access Windows PS modules via implicit remoting. If a lack of native support for your favorite modules in Core has been holding you back, give this a shot.
Reddit /r/PowerShell - Popular Weekly Post
Help with CSVs is a pretty common request, so this seems fitting. Want to know how to compare values from two columns? Look no further for a simple solution, plus some other tidbits on working with CSVs.
Youtube: 5 ways to select Unique items in PowerShell
Prateek Singh has put out a nice and short video to demonstrate 5 ways that you can select unique items in PowerShell. All of us learned at least one new technique from this, so hopefully you do too.
Related Articles
PowerShell Escape Room
PowerShell Escape Room by Michiel Hamers
by Michiel Hamers
https://about.me/michielhamers/
Why on earth you want to create an Escape Room with PowerShell as backend?
I’ve always been a fan of escape rooms, so I decided to create my own for my kids. I wanted to make it something that would be challenging and fun for them, but also educational. I decided to use PowerShell as the backend for the escape room, as I’m a PowerShell developer and I thought it would be a great way to learn more about the language.
The first step was to design the rooms. I wanted to make sure that there were a variety of puzzles and challenges that my kids would have to solve. I also wanted to make sure that the rooms were visually appealing and engaging. Once I had the rooms designed, I started building them.
I used a variety of materials to build the rooms, including wood, cardboard, and fabric. I also used a few electronic components, such as a USB extension cable with a switch and a 3-button keyboard. The USB extension cable with a switch was used to create a physical button that my kids could press to solve one of the puzzles. The 3-button keyboard was used to enter the code that my kids had to find to solve another puzzle.
I also used a few websites to create rebus puzzles that my kids had to solve. I printed out the rebus puzzles and placed them around the rooms. Once my kids had solved all of the puzzles, they were able to enter the code on a single screen to escape the room.
In this blog post, we’ll delve into the process of creating an engaging PowerShell escape room for the global PowerShell community. We’ll emphasize the significance of storytelling and provide a detailed breakdown of the PowerShell structure used for the escape room.
Microsoft Graph PowerShell Module: Getting Started Guide
Microsoft Graph PowerShell Module: Getting Started Guide
by Jeff Brown
Microsoft is retiring the Azure AD Graph API sometime after June 30, 2023 (announcement). This retirement includes the Azure AD PowerShell module. In its place, Microsoft has released the Microsoft Graph PowerShell module. The Microsoft Graph PowerShell module is the next-generation way of managing Microsoft cloud services using PowerShell. If you have used MSOnline or Azure AD PowerShell in the past, you’ll need to read on to learn about this new module.
ICYMI: PowerShell Week of 08-October-2021
Topics include VMWare, Windows 11, Web Reports and more…
Special thanks to Robin Dadswell, Prasoon Karunan V, Kiran Patnayakuni and Kevin Laux
How to gather your vCenter inventory data with this VMware PowerShell script
by Scott Matteson on 7th October
Inventory reports are a common request when administering a VMware vCenter environment. Learn how this VMware PowerShell script can make such requests quick and easy
Building a Web Report in PowerShell, use the -Force Luke
by Chris Noring on 8th October