I had a discussion last night via twitter with one of the attendees that I met at the Microsoft Cloud Roadshow in London earlier this year and the outcome of the conversation was that although I find it easy to find out about events – this isn’t all that common for others.
So I decided that I would quickly jot down some of the places that can be useful to search to find events that are going on around you.
Ryan YatesConsultant
Just a person in their 30's doing things in Tech & trying to break the stigma's around talking about Mental Health
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This is the personal blog site of Ryan Yates
In IT - Specialising in PowerShell, Automation, DevOps, Azure & Office 365
Outside of IT - Music, Psychology/Mental Health, Science, Law & Politics
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There are a number of posts on this blog
There are currently many drafts in progress & have been for a long time
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There will be a time where you are attempting a new task, whether that is personally or professionally and you find yourself having to resort to the documentation of the product to get to the end goal, whether that be to put together a new piece of furniture, preparing an exquisite meal or bashing different bits of software together from different companies or more commonly the same company.
One thing that is common in all these scenarios is that if the documentation is completely missing then you are forced down the road where you take the “pot luck”/”educated” guess to get to the desired end result and sometimes that can lead to some hilarious results, especially if it is in relation to cooking or building furniture.
Warning – this post is over 3800 words long and perhaps should have been split into a series – however I felt it best to keep it together – Make sure you have a brew (or 2) to keep you going throughout reading this
In this post we will be looking at how you can build a VM Lab environment from pretty much scratch. This maybe for testing SharePoint applications, SQL Server, Exchange or could be for additional peace of mind when deploying troublesome patches.
The MVP Award is defined by Microsoft as the below
Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, or MVPs, are community leaders who’ve demonstrated an exemplary commitment to helping others get the most out of their experience with Microsoft technologies. They share their exceptional passion, real-world knowledge, and technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft.
This means that within the different areas of the Microsoft Stack there are those out there that really believe that the world can be a better place when we come together as a united front and share the knowledge that we have.
This is just a very quick post to give my Congratulations to all the New and Renewed MVP’s that have and continue to make the community a much better place.
I wasn’t one of them this time around but perhaps that will change in the future
Well only if you read this post
This is an exceptional honour to have been awarded the MVP for Cloud and DataCentre Management and to me this kinda feels like an early birthday present from Microsoft (my birthday is on Monday)
This isn’t something that I ever expected to achieve however it is a recognition from Microsoft themselves of the work that I have previously done for the community.
I started off down the community path only last year in that time I have made some amazing friends and met a number of other MVP’s along the way.
This is a quick walkthrough on how you can get output from PSScriptAnalyzer rules in your Pester tests.
So you’ll need
Pester ( Version 3.4.0 or above ) PSScriptAnalyzer ( Version 1.4.0 or above ) Please note this is shown running on PowerShell v5 as part of Windows 10 Build 14295 – results may vary on other PowerShell Versions
In the nature of the way we want to work we may have new ScriptAnalyzer rules in the near future (new version / additional community additions / your own custom ScriptAnalyzer rules etc) and we would want ensure that we test for them all without having to change much of the below code
After yet more changes in my housing see my previous post for a bit of background link – I have decided to settle in Derby and this has been for a few very good reasons.
I’ve got a good group of friends here. Manchester, London, Nottingham, Birmingham & Wolverhampton are all short train journeys away and I’m expecting to spend more time between them in the coming months ahead. I almost moved here back in January – but I decided to try and give Manchester another go from the work perspective and this seemingly wasn’t to be the case However I made a good group of friends in Manchester at the various events I’ve been to there over the last 2 years (more so the last year – see this page for more details) and I’ll still be trying to attend some of the amazing events there when it is feasible.
In a discussion that started on Twitter a while back with June Blender about the quality of the Modules being posted to the PowerShell Gallery I had an Idea on a way that we could help improve this from the community – using the tools that we have available to us and more importantly the expertise of the rest of the community to help shape and guide the direction for modules.
Disclaimer This isn’t a fun post (to read or to write) and nor is it a technical post – this is a reflection on the last few years and is in its very nature quite a personal post. I expect that there will be some kick backs about this post in future and I would humbly ask that you try and imagine yourself having been in my shoes at the time of these events happening and also at the time of writing this post.
Update 9th March 2016 - PowerShell Team released an updated version of the PackageManagement modules today and I’ve updated the Script accordingly and will install the latest PackageManagement modules for you with a little verbose output
Updated Microsoft blog is at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2016/03/08/package-management-preview-march-2016-for-powershell-4-3-is-now-available/
This is a very very quick post about the latest feature being made available downlevel from Powershell v5.
As Microsoft have released PackageManagement (formally OneGet) that is now avaliable for PowerShell v3 & v4 as detailed in this link http://blogs.
In working on the PSWordPress Module that Stephen Owen (@foxdeploy) has started I came across an interesting issue after running my Pester tests which calls - $ModuleFunction.Definition.Contains(’.Synopsis’) | Should be True to check for comment based help - and it was failing even though I had Comment Based help in there. The problem was that the Help was Above the Function Keyword - so this means that it wasn’t carried through to the $ModuleFunction.
UPDATE 25/12/2015 - Due to WMF5 Install issues the InstallWMF5.ps1 Script has been removed from GitHub until the PowerShell Product Team re-release the WMF5 installers. Once re-released I will re-release the InstallWMF5.ps1 script
UPDATE 24/02/2016 - WMF5 was re-released today and the below scripts should still work
This is a very very quick post about installing WMF5 on Windows 8.1 or Server 2012 / Server 2012 R2 via this function script I created
Today I’m off to London for the 5/6 time already this year. This time I’m off to present at the WinOps Meetup and then attend the Chef Users Meetup the following day. My Presentation at WinOps will be the one that I gave for the Mississippi PowerShell User Group.
Looking forward to seeing old faces and new ones there as well!
I recently presented to the Mississippi PowerShell User Group via Skype for Business on Tuesday 9th (well Wednesday as it was 2:30am that I presented for them)
The video from that session is now online at https://youtu.be/z3CmI73LnyI
My session was around my Script & Module Creation Workflow and the Tight integration with Git & Pester that I have included in a module that is an Addon to the PowerShell ISE - Called ISE_Cew
January was a month where I did a lot of travelling and attending different user groups.
I attended the following events
12th - PASS SQL London Chapter 14th - Microsoft UKITCAMP event - What’s New in Windows 10 Enterprise 14th - WinOps Meetup - London 19th - SharePoint User Groups - Leeds 20th - Microsoft UKITCAMP event - What’s New in Server 2016 - Manchester 20th - LeanAgile Meetup - Manchester 26th - .
If you have been involved in the #PSTweetChat events that have been running with Adam Bertram (@adbertram) & Jeffery Hicks (@JeffHicks) and a number of others, then you would be aware of just how awesome these 1-hour open discussion sessions truly are.
A number of PowerShell Questions get asked and answered from members of the PowerShell community worldwide so they can become a valuable resource to getting a right answer to an issue quickly or even just learning more about the people that make the awesome community and what they are currently up to this week.
The UK PowerShell User Groups (Get-PSUGUK) are undergoing an expansion with some new User Groups being sprung up across the UK over the upcoming months.
If you have been able to attend any of the previous events (Manchester & London) then you will know that I’m a big advocate for making a real community out of the User Group Meet ups – one where there is the opportunity for those from all differing IT backgrounds to rise up and present a topic to their local User Group.
So this is Part 3 of a series of Blog Posts on my (currently ever changing) Workflow with Git, Github & PowerShell.
Hopefully you have had chance to look at the previous posts in this series if not they are
Part 1
Part 2
However, for this post we will be concentrating on Script & Module Creation and how we can make the overall experience more efficient with the PSISE_Addons module that I’m releasing on Github https://github.
Ok so If you didn’t already know then this happened
I got bored so have Created an Auto-Bot for Tweeting about Releases in the PowerShell Gallery
cc @jsnover https://t.co/QgfMhTaGDu
— Ryan (@ryanyates1990) December 31, 2015 And although it has been interesting it has also brought up some issues (mainly data which is one of my biggest bug bears in all things IT) with the PowerShell Gallery and these include and is not limited to