My family has been out of town this week. Light bulb moment! It’s the perfect time to cut holes in sheetrock and drill holes in ceilings to install my home network gear.
When we moved a couple of months ago, I literally threw the network equipment in a closet.
I used the same equipment from my previous home except for a new cable modem. Specifically, the Motorola MB8600 which is gigabit capable since I now have gigabit Internet service.
As many of you know, I’m a Senior Content Developer for Azure PowerShell at Microsoft. Today we announced the Az.Tools.Migration PowerShell module which is a toolkit for automatically migrating your PowerShell scripts and modules from AzureRM to the Az PowerShell module. The video shown below demonstrates how to use this module:
Be sure to see the official announcement that I wrote on the Microsoft Tech Community blog site. In addition to the PowerShell module, there is also a VS Code extension for performing the migration.
Windows 10 Enterprise edition version 2004 is used for the scenarios demonstrated in this blog article. If you’d like to follow along, you’ll also need to install PowerShell version 7 and the Az PowerShell module.
As stated in the help for Connect-AzAccount, the UseDeviceAuthentication parameter is the default authentication type for PowerShell version 6 and higher.
help Connect-AzAccount -Parameter UseDeviceAuthentication What this means is that you’re provided with a URL and a code.
I’ve worked as an IT Pro since 1994, with the past fourteen years at the same employer and my last day with them was this past Friday. I’ve also been a Microsoft MVP for the past six years, the first two as a PowerShell MVP and the last four as a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP. Today is my last day as a Microsoft MVP because you can’t be an MVP if you work for Microsoft.
I’ve recently wondered how many service offerings Azure has. I’ve read anywhere from 150 to 600 and I even went so far as to ask an Azure Product Manager but still didn’t receive a clear answer. What I did find out is that Microsoft maintains an Azure services directory on their Azure products website.
I figured that was a good place to start looking and while the website is informative, it didn’t provide a count of the service offerings.
As I mentioned in a previous blog article, the AzureRM PowerShell module is only supported until December of 2020. It has been replaced by the Az PowerShell module which was introduced in December of 2018.
On Twitter, I recently asked if anyone was still using the AzureRM module and what was keeping them from transitioning to the Az module. One of the responses I received was due to the amount of work and time invested in scripts based on the AzureRM module.
The Az PowerShell module was released in December of 2018 and is now the recommended module for managing Microsoft Azure. AzureRM is the previous PowerShell module for managing Azure which has been deprecated but will continue to be supported until December of 2020.
Windows PowerShell 5.1, PowerShell Core 6, PowerShell 7, and higher are supported by the Az PowerShell module. Windows 10 version 1607 and higher has Windows PowerShell 5.1 installed by default.
Back on November 25th of 2019, I made the list of one of the 30 Must-Follow Small Business IT Influencers.
Here’s what their website had to say about me:
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I recently saw a tweet from Joel Bennett about the Az (Azure) PowerShell module being nothing more than an empty module that imports all of the modules for each Azure product.
I decided to investigate.
Get-Content -Path (Get-Module -Name az).Path | Select-String -SimpleMatch 'Import-Module' Joel’s statement is 100% accurate.
Off-Topic: The searched for term is highlighted in each result when the previous command is run in PowerShell 7.
For Christmas, I received a CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 4GB Starter Kit with Clear Case (4GB RAM).
The kit contains everything you need minus an HDMI monitor and USB keyboard/mouse.
It includes the Raspberry Pi 4b (I received the one with 4GB of RAM, but it’s also available with 1GB or 2GB of RAM), heatsinks, a power supply with a removable inline switch, case (I ordered the one with a clear case), case fan, micro HDMI to HDMI cable, micro SD card with NOOBS preinstalled (I ordered the one with a 32GB card), and a USB micro SD card reader in case you need to reload NOOBS on the SD card.
Recently, I’ve been working on trying to finish up a migration from Exchange Server 2010 to Office 365. There are potentially numerous mailboxes that aren’t used and those won’t be migrated to Office 365 because there’s no sense in paying for licensing for them.
How do you determine what mailboxes are in use?
First, use implicit remoting to load the Exchange cmdlets locally. Years ago, I would install the Exchange cmdlets locally, but it was brought to my attention that it’s unsupported, at least according to this article: Directly Loading Exchange 2010 or 2013 SnapIn Is Not Supported.
The call for speakers for the 2020 PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit is open until October 1st. I can definitely speak from experience when I say that this is the best PowerShell conference in North America if you’re interested in PowerShell and networking with other like-minded people. I’ve attended every year since its inception and have spoken at it about half as many times.
While I’m in no way affiliated with the organizers, based on their site, they’re not only looking for deep-dive content but also intermediate sessions.
If you’ve been using PowerShell for very long at all, then you should already be familiar with Get-Command and Get-Help. While I like to say that Get-Command is for finding commands and Get-Help is for learning how to use those commands once you’ve found them, there is overlap between these two commands depending on how you use them.
I believe in following the best practice of not using aliases or positional parameters in any code that I save or share with others, but in this blog article, I’m going to show how things work in the real world.
The Research Triangle PowerShell Saturday is Saturday, September 21st, 2019 in Raleigh, North Carolina. There’s also a 6-hour security session on Sunday, September 22nd, 2019. Tickets can be purchased for just one of the days or both, but seating is limited for the Sunday post-con so don’t wait until the last minute!
Based on the schedule, this event should be almost like a mini PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit which makes it well worth the price of admission.
Preview 3 of PowerShell 7 was released yesterday. It can be downloaded from the PowerShell repository on GitHub. Be sure to choose the preview version for the appropriate operating system. It should go without saying that anything with preview in its name should NOT be installed on a mission-critical production system.
The examples shown in this blog article are being run on a system running Windows 10 (x64). Your mileage may vary with other operating systems and/or versions.
I’ll be presenting PowerShell + SQL Server = Better Together and Writing Award Winning PowerShell Functions and Script Modules at SQL Saturday #867 in Baton Rouge Louisiana this Saturday, August 17th. The event is free, although you need to register.
Here’s a little information about what you can expect from my sessions:
PowerShell + SQL Server = Better Together
As a SQL Server professional, are you able to make a rhyme or reason to this thing called PowerShell?