Oct 09 2014
Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to spend the day with Mike MacGillivray, a Professional Field Engineer from Microsoft that specializes in Microsoft Public Key Infrastructure or PKI. During that meeting we ended up building a brand new Microsoft PKI platform in our development environment. I ended up taking a ton of screenshots and …
Sep 18 2014
Unimportant Backstory Today I was unfortunate to discover that one of the drives in my FreeNAS box failed. I replaced the drive and wanted to watch the progress of the rebuild. If you log into the FreeNAS web management console there is a section that shows you the number of sectors synchronized and the percent …
Sep 11 2014
Do you fight to keep good documentation? Do you struggle with others that don’t make any documentation? Do you find the entire process of creating documentation too cumbersome? Do you find situations where you know someone made documentation but you can’t find it? Do you use an web based wiki today that absolutely sucks for …
Sep 10 2014
This HOWTO describes how to use PowerShell to solve for a situation where you have a series of values and you want to have them display a different set of values. Think of a scenario where you get an array that contains country codes such as "CA, US, JP" but you want them to display …
Aug 18 2014
get-website | Add-Member-MemberTypeScriptProperty-NameOutageEnabled-value { test-path$this.physicalpath } -PassThru | select name, OutageEnabled Here you’ll find 3 more PowerShell tricks I’ve learned over the weekend. See what properties are available First, here is a really simple one. As you work with PowerShell, you’ll constantly run into new cmdlets that return some kind of object and you want …
Aug 12 2014
Last weekend I found myself curious how Lync 2013 managed sharing screenshots. Since I didn’t have a Lync platform to test with, I decided to build one to find out. (I’m a little bit odd I realize but if you’re reading this then you’ve almost certainly done something similar.) This is by no means a …
Aug 12 2014
Today I was asked to produce the email addresses of a few thousand employees based on the First Name and Last Names provided by HR. Easy, right? Well it would be except of course for the many edge cases where the name HR has for an employee is completely different than what is actually recorded …
Jul 26 2014
I’ve been using PowerShell for a while now and in that time I’ve come up with a few tips and tricks that I find myself using a lot. Below you’ll find a handful of commands I find myself using most often: 1) Run a command with elevated permissions Ever needed to run a command …
Jul 26 2014
"640kb ought to be enough for anybody." – Bill Gates, 1981 That quote, while Bill Gates claims is apocryphal has nonetheless become cautionary shorthand for a situation where you arbitrarily limit your design under the inevitable false assumption that no one will ever need to exceed your design specifications. I suspect that this quote is …
Jul 21 2014
Due to the nature of how PowerShell was designed, it actually offers direct access to the .NET framework which means we can do some pretty cool things. For example, with only a relative few lines of code, we can create a full “Visual Basic” style GUI based application entirely in PowerShell! The catch to this …
