PowerShell Team
Automating the world one-liner at a time…
Latest posts
New Policy Cmdlets for Nano Server
We have just released another set of new cmdlets intended for use on Nano Server for managing local policy. Although Nano Server doesn't support Group Policy, it does support local policy. Previously, we released Security cmdlets to deal with .INF and .CSV files. Today, we released the GPRegistryPolicy cmdlets which will deal with .POL files containing registry policy settings. .POL files can be generated from GPO Backups, or they can be generated with . POL files will have either Local Machine or Local User registry keys, which must be specified to the and cmdlets. For Nano Server, all relevant settings wil...
DSC Resource Kit – Anniversary Release
We've just updated the DSC Resource Kit to celebrate our 1 year open-source anniversary! The DSC Resource Kit has come a long way in a year. Originally, DSC started with only in-box resources. To make these resources easier to update, some were moved to TechNet's Script Center and became the DSC Resource Kit. Finally in April 2015, the DSC Resource Kit was open-sourced to the community on GitHub with all modules available to download in the PowerShell Gallery. Now, the DSC Resource Kit has passed it's first anniversary as open-source, and what a year it's been! We now have 302 DSC Resources across 52 modules!...
New Security Cmdlets in Nano Server
In Windows Server 2016 TP5, we included two new cmdlets to help manage security policy settings. While they are present on every install option of Windows Server, these are mostly useful on Nano Server because Nano Server does not support Group Policy. Security-related settings include two different kinds of artifacts. • .INF files containing security policy template settings. These are handled by the "securityCmdlets"(*) module that ships in Technical Preview 5 • .CSV files containing advanced audit settings. these are handled by the "securityCmdlets"(*) module that ships in Technical Preview ...
Understanding the PowerShell UserVoice
The PowerShell Team been using UserVoice to take in requests, feedback and bug reports for a few months now. It’s been really great seeing feedback come in directly from the PowerShell community. I wanted to give some details around how your feedback gets used and what happens to something after it gets posted to UserVoice. We recently added some status definitions to our UserVoice forum. I’m going to walk through UserVoice to show how we do things, and give more detail on what those definitions actually mean in practice. Suppose I want to share my deepest desire - an open source version of the Archive module....
Developing PowerShell Cmdlets for Nano Server using the PowerShell Core SDK
Looking to develop PowerShell cmdlets for Nano Server? Try out our new PowerShell SDK for Nano on the PowerShell Gallery. Or, if you already have Windows 10 or Windows Management Framework 5.0 installed, simply run: If you've been watching the Server & Cloud Blog, you'll know that we recently announced the availability of Technical Preview 5 of Windows Server 2016. And if you've also been following the Windows Server Blog, you will have noticed that last week marked the latest installment of the "10 Reasons You'll Love Windows Server" series. Not surprisingly, in Jeffrey's Top Ten for Windows Server 2016 ...
The Archive module is now open-source
Over the past year, the PowerShell Team has released and developed a ton of open-source code. Many of our open-source projects started and have grown out in the open, like our DSC resources, PowerShell Script Analyzer, PowerShell Editor Services, and the PowerShell VS Code plugin. Others are existing open-source projects where we've started to contribute new code like OpenSSH, Pester, or PSReadline. However, until now, we have not open-sourced any core components of PowerShell that originally started as closed-source. Today, we're proud to announce that Microsoft.PowerShell.Archive, a module that shipped as...
View File Content Feature is Available on the Gallery
We are excited to let you know that you can now view files and their contents directly from the PowerShellGallery! We have received a lot of feedback that you want to see the file contents in the items and scripts before downloading them, so we enabled browsing item content on the Gallery. This feature includes two parts: listing the files within the item, and displaying file contents for supported file types. Currently we support displaying the contents of the following file extensions: .ps1, .psm1, .psd1, .ps1xml, .xml and .txt. Listing the Files in the Item/Script On the item details page you can f...
AWS DSC Toolkit
We have just released a brand new module called the AWS DSC Toolkit! This module allows you to register AWS EC2 instances as DSC Nodes in Azure Automation. You can then control your EC2 instances in Azure Automation using PowerShell DSC configurations. The 4 new cmdlets provided by this module are: An example of these cmdlets is available here. This module is currently in preview. It is provided as is and is not supported through any Microsoft support program or service. Installation The AWS DSC Toolkit is available on the PowerShell Gallery. You can install it using PSGet: The source code is als...
Windows Management Framework 5.0 Updates and WMF 5.1
Thanks to all of you, the Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.0 release has been a huge success. WMF 5.0 RTM has had over 130,000 downloads in the first 5 weeks after release! We will be servicing WMF 5.0, providing fixes as necessary. We will also continue to make small improvements to features and components as we move toward the release of Windows Server 2016 later this year. When Windows Server 2016 ships we will release WMF 5.1, which includes all the changes and responses to your feedback that have been made since WMF 5.0 shipped. Many of these improvements are currently included in the Windows 10 Ins...