PowerShell Team
Automating the world one-liner at a time…
Latest posts
Regular cadence for PowerShell Core Community Call
tl;dr: PowerShell Core Community Calls are on the third Thursday of every month at 9:30am Pacific Time (note, this is currently PDT). Use this .ics file (right-click and select in order to download the file correctly) to avoid missing one. Hi everyone! After three successful PowerShell Core Community Calls, we're switching to a more standard cadence so that you can plan ahead and join us! For those of you that haven't heard of the PowerShell Core Community Call, it's a one hour meeting where the PowerShell Committee gets together to talk with you to help us make decisions on the evolving design of PowerShell ...
Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.1 now in Microsoft Update Catalog
The Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.1 is now available in the Microsoft Update catalog for Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Windows 8.1. These updates are listed in the catalog as KB3191564 and KB3191565. Those who use WSUS to manage updates for their systems are now able to install WMF 5.1 for most of the WMF-supported Windows versions. The packages for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are only available via the Download Center at this time. As previously announced, WMF 5.1 is a required update for WMF 5.0, and may be installed directly over WMF 5.0. As of June 1, 2017, users ...
DSC Resource Kit Release March 2017
We just released the DSC Resource Kit! This release includes updates to 10 DSC resource modules, including 19 new DSC resources. In these past 6 weeks, 155 pull requests (the most ever!) have been merged and 71 issues have been closed, all thanks to our amazing community! A few weeks ago we also released a new DSC resource module called SecurityPolicyDsc with resources to configure local security policies through secedit. Thank you to Jason Walker for this great new module! The modules updated in this release are: For a detailed list of the resource modules and fixes in this r...
Using PowerShell Modules in Azure Functions
Previously, I blogged about how I created PowerShell GitHub Dashboard using Azure Functions to run a PowerShell script and didn't use PowerShell Modules as I didn't find an easy way to do it with Azure Functions. Stefan informed me that you can easily do it using FTP! Today, I'm publishing a guest blog post that Stefan authored that walks you through how to use PowerShell Modules in Azure Functions! Steve Lee published a couple of blog posts about how he created a PowerShell Open Source Community Dashboard in PowerBi. In his last blog post he explained how he used PowerShell, Azure StorageTable, Azur...
Code Coverage – Part 2
In my last post on code coverage, I shared the process for you to collect coverage for your environment. This week, I'll be describing a way to use our tools to create new tests and show how you can measure the increase of coverage for PowerShell Core after adding new tests. To recap, we can collect code coverage with the OpenCover module, and then inspect the coverage. In this case I would like to know about coverage for a specific cmdlet. For this post, we're going to focus on the Clear-Content Cmdlet because coverage is ok, but not fantastic and it is small enough to go over easily. Here's a partial capture f...
Managing Security Settings on Nano Server with DSC
We have released DSC resources building upon the previously released security and registry cmdlets for applying security settings. You can now implement Microsoft-defined security baselines using DSC. AuditPolicyDsc SecurityPolicyDsc GPRegistryPolicy Install all 3 from the Gallery with the command: A sample configuration, below, takes the Security Baselines for Windows Server 2016 and extracts the .inf, .csv and .pol containing the desired security settings from the exported Group Policy Objects. (You can find information on extracting the necessary files in the Registry cmdlets blogpost.) Simply pass the files ...
Building a GitHub Dashboard using PowerShell, AzureStorageTable, AzureFunction, and PowerBI
Last week, I published a PowerShell Community Dashboard and today, I'm going to share the code and cover some of the learnings.The code is published as a module on the PowerShell Gallery. Make sure you get v1.1 as I found an issue where if you're not a member of the PowerShell Org on GitHub, you won't have permission to query the members so I changed the code to accommodate that.You can install the module using: (and it works on PowerShell Core 6.0 including Linux! I only tested it with alpha.15, though...) Once installed, you can just run it manually: The is something you would gener...
Installing latest PowerShell Core 6.0 Release on Linux just got easier!
As we continue our journey from Alpha releases and eventually to Beta, you can continue to download the latest releases from our GitHub repository. However, our goal has always been to enable installation through popular existing Linux package management tools like apt-get and yum.I am pleased to announce that we have now published PowerShell Core 6.0 alpha.15 to https://packages.microsoft.com! Install PowerShell Core on Ubuntu 14.04 Install PowerShell Core on Ubuntu 16.04 Install PowerShell Core on CentOS After registering the Microsoft repository once as supe...
PowerShell Open Source Community Dashboard
Since going cross-platform and open source on GitHub, I've wanted to know how we are doing as a community and who the top contributors we should recognize are. The available GitHub graphs are not sufficient as they focus on commits, and there are many other ways for the community to contribute to PowerShell. Certainly receiving Pull Requests (PRs) has a direct impact on the code base, but opening issues, commenting on issues, and commenting on PRs (aka code reviews) are also immensely appreciated and valuable to help improve PowerShell.In addition, PowerShell is not a single repository, but several repositories t...