ICYMI: PowerShell Week of 1-November-2019

Topics include Teams, Scheduled Jobs, Halloween fun and more

ICYMI: PowerShell Week of 25-October-2019

Topics include RepAdmin, Certificates and Testing Teams connections.

ICYMI: PowerShell Week of 18-October-2019

Topics include idempotency, Jenkins, PowerShell for beginners and more.

Last Call for Summit 2020 CFP

So! Proposals for the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2020 are due in less than two weeks, on October 1st. We have some solid talks lined up, but we’re still behind where we were last year, and need more proposals!
We’ve heard a lot of questions - What topics are you looking for?, I don’t know what to propose! and so on. Let’s cover some ways to find topics and hopefully spark some ideas!

The Ternary Cometh

Developers are likely to be familiar with ternary conditional operators as they’re legal in many languages (Ruby, Python, C++, etc).  They’re also often used in coding interviews to test an applicant as they can be a familiar source of code errors.  While some developers couldn’t care less about ternary operators, there’s been a cult following waiting for them to show up in Powershell.  That day is almost upon us.
Any Powershell developer can easily be forgiven for scratching their heads and wondering what a ternary is.  In the most basic sense a ternary evaluates an expression to a binary result and carries out one of two possible outcomes.  Lets start by looking at some code examples:

Quick ProTip: Negotiate TLS Connections In Powershell With A Minimum TLS Version Requirement

Synopsis

This is a quick post to highlight the nuances of Powershell and protocol management in regard to TLS connections. If you’ve ever attempted to make a secure connection (for example, an API request) to a service with certain net security requirements, you might have run into this problem.

While TLS is negotiated at the highest level existing on both the server and the client, the minimum protocols defined by Powershell may include ones that you explicitly do not want. While explicitly declaring an enumerated protocol list is easy enough, what happens when Tls13 becomes more common, and we want to start utilizing it when it’s available? Then Tls14, and beyond?

Learn To Use Verbose Output Streams In Your Pester Tests

I’m going to file this under “Either I’m a genius, or there’s a much better way and everyone knows it except for me.”

I recently began adding a suite of Pester tests to one of my projects and I found myself needing to mock some unit tests against a particular function that would modify a variable based on the parameter specified. Since all the functions I write nowadays are considered advanced functions (and yours should be too, they’re free!), I discovered a nice way to test the function’s actions using the

Secure Your Powershell Session with JEA and Constrained Endpoints

Index

• What is a Constrained Endpoint and Why Would I Need One?

• Setup and Configuration

• Using our Endpoint

What is a constrained endpoint and why would I need one?

Powershell constrained endpoints are a means of interacting with powershell in a manner consistent with the principal of least privilege. In Powershell terms, this is referred to as Just-Enough-Administration, or JEA.

JEA is very well documented, so this won’t simply be repeating everything those references detail. Instead, we’ll go through a simple, real-world use-case of when and why you might need to deploy one.

Running Universal Dashboard with Ubuntu and Nginx (With HTTPS!)

A basic UniversalDashboard running on nginx

Index

• Prerequisites

• Configuration

• HTTPS (Optional)

Prerequisites

For this writeup, I’m using Ubuntu 18.04. Software packages are geared toward using that version.

First, we’ll need to install our dependencies

There are several ways to install Powershell core on Ubuntu. I recommend Microsoft’s documentation for ubuntu 18.04 here

Once installed, enter Powershell and install the UniversalDashboard module. This will use the community edition.

pwsh PS> Install-Module UniversalDashboard.Community -Scope CurrentUser Confirm it is installed:

Tips for Writing Cross-Platform PowerShell Code

I just spent a month updating one of our PowerShell modules to support Linux and MacOS. I learned a lot that I wanted to share with the community as cross-platform support becomes more and more important.

Use “Environment” Class Properties Instead of “env:” Drive

Environment variables are different between the different operating systems. All of them have

PATH , but not much else. Windows and MacOS both have variables for the temp directory, but they have different names.