Articles

PowerShell articles, tutorials, and guides from community experts.

Terri Donahue

Special Charlotte PowerShell Group meeting on 4/22 featuring Lee Holmes

Charlotte hackers, our regularly scheduled meeting on April 2nd will not be occurring. Instead we will have our monthly meeting on April 22nd. Can you hear the drum roll in the distance? It will continue to build to a crescendo as April 22nd approaches. Lee Holmes will be speaking at the meeting. In this highly interactive session, Principle PowerShell developer Lee Holmes shares some of his favorite PowerShell tips and tricks.

Greg Altman
PowerShell for Admins

Home Labs for the IT pro

Every IT pro needs a lab. It’s not just the fact that we all have a little mad scientist in us, it’s a playground for experimentation and learning. By “lab” I do not mean a formal test or dev environment, but a much more informal setting that typically goes before the “dev” part gets started. This lab need not be expensive. A little creative repurposing and virtualization will go a long way towards getting started with a home lab.

Jacob Benson

March Omaha PowerShell User Group Meeting

This month we have several exciting things going on! First, Trond Hindenes will be joining us via Lync from the great country of Norway for a presentation on Service Management Automation (SMA). Trond is a Senior Consultant at Crayon who spends most of his non-snowboarding time working on Microsoft System Center, PowerShell, Active Directory, Virtualization and Microsoft Azure. You can find him onTwitter and on his website Trond’s Working! Second, the first 30 minutes of this meeting will be used to announce the “official” formation of an Omaha System Center Users Group and to give attendees time to network with each other and talk to Matt, Kelly and Zac about the formation of the user group (if they are interested in learning more about it).

Steve
PowerShell for Admins

The fastest Powershell #1 : Count all users in Active Directory domain

Updated : October 01, 2015 ** Question **: What is the fastest solution to count all the users in Active Directory domain? ** Answer **: To answer this question, I will compare 17 different commands in a domain with 75 000 users. `[System.GC]::WaitForPendingFinalizers() [System.GC]::Collect() Set-Location -Path ‘C:\demo’ Add-Type -AssemblyName System.DirectoryServices.Protocols Import-Module -Name .\S.DS.P.psd1 Add-PSSnapin -Name ‘Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement’ $searcher = [adsisearcher]’(&(objectclass=user)(objectcategory=person))' $searcher.SearchRoot = ‘LDAP://DC=domain,DC=com’ $searcher.PageSize = 1000 $searcher.PropertiesToLoad.AddRange((‘samaccountname’)) function Get-QueryResult { [CmdletBinding()] Param ( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)] [int]$Id ) switch ($id) { 1 { ( Get-ADUser -Filter ‘objectClass -eq “user” -and objectCategory -eq “person”’ -SearchBase ‘DC=domain,DC=com’ -Properties SamAccountName).

Terri Donahue

Charlotte PowerShell User Group Meeting–3/5/2015

We will be bringing you a presentation by Jason Walker, @AutomationJason, at our next meeting. Jason will be discussing the Anatomy of a DSC Resource. The session will dive into the anatomy of a DSC resource and will provide an understanding of what it takes to develop your own DSC resources. Food and drinks will be provided. Everyone is welcome. Please RSVP on the MeetUp event page so we can plan food accordingly.

Don Jones
Announcements

PowerShell Summit Europe Registration

Registration for PowerShell Summit Europe will commence on February 27th, 2015 at roughly 12:01am server time (I believe the server is in a Pacific time Azure datacenter). We will be limited to roughly 100 attendees. I want everyone to understand the basic rules of engagement for this. Setting up and running this event involves significant financial risk. While in this case the event venue, a Microsoft office in Kista (near Stockholm), Sweden, isn’t charging us huge fees and requiring us to commit to hotel rooms and the like, there is still risk.

NJPowerShell
PowerShell for Admins

NJ PowerShell UG Meeting March 5th: Presenter Adam Bertram

The NJ PowerShell User Group is having a meetup on Thursday, March 6th from 6:00 - 8:00 PM. The first half hour will be for socializing, pizza, and playing pool at our coffee bar. Registration: EventBrite You must register to attend in person. Agenda: 6:00 – 6:30: Pizza and socializing 6:30 – 7:30: Presentation 7:30 - 8:00: Q & A Please note that the Webex meeting will start at 6:00 PM, but the actual presentation won’t start until 6:30

Don Jones
Announcements

Design the Next Scripting Games

We have some folks working on the next Scripting Games… but we want some feedback from the community to make sure we’re offering something of value. The current plan is to run a series of events, with both Beginner and Intermediate tracks. There will be no “advanced” track; the feeling is that, if you’re advanced, you should be helping out by judging ;). Events will be constructed as a combination of puzzles and real-world tasks, meaning some things will simply test your PowerShell skills, while others will test them in a more production-applicable way.

Terri Donahue

Charlotte PowerShell User Group 2/5/2014

It has been quite a busy past couple of months and we have not had our monthly get-together. We are working to get back on track and will start in February. This month, I will be discussing IIS and PowerShell at our meeting. For those of you that do not know me, I am an IIS MVP and a PowerShell hack. I would like to tailor the discussion, demos, and examples to address specific questions or needs that the members have.