Sam Erde

This Wednesday, October 15th, I encountered an unpleasant surprise when I began connecting to Microsoft 365 services to test the latest prerelease version of Maester: I could not connect to Microsoft Teams using PowerShell!

There are a surprising number of ways that you can install PowerShell on a system. Today we'll look at how to install it as a ".NET tool." This approach is not necessary or ideal for everyday use, but it does have some valid use cases and conveniently does not require local admin rights.

As IT professionals, we thrive on learning new things, tackling challenges, and growing our skills. While this is work inherently satisfying, we can only find real meaning in our work when we understand why we do it, when we are able to contribute value to the community, and when we take care of ourselves. These ideas drive my passion to keep growing and to connect with others who feel the same. Plus, as you may have guessed, I love geeking out about PowerShell, Microsoft 365, Windows Server, and securing all the things!

Many people have already written about the benefits of using PowerShell's Join-Path cmdlet. Instead of repeating the details, let's review some of the less common tricks, and then look at the differences between Windows PowerShell 5.1 and newer versions of PowerShell.

Through most of the past 20 years of working with Active Directory, I have supported and worked in multi-forest environments. This work has involved one forest being split into 3 forests, a cross-forest migration of Exchange Server (I was spared the first one), and multiple forest consolidation projects. At various points throughout that timeline, I have needed to write PowerShell scripts that rely on either the DNS name, NetBIOS name, or SID of domains in the trust relationship. This information is easy to get using the ActiveDirectory module's Get-ADTrust cmdlet.

The Microsoft Graph SDK v2.23.0 was released today, and with it, the updated Microsoft Graph PowerShell module. You can use Update-Module or Update-PSResource to update this module, or you can try out my new PSPReworkout module's Update-AllTheThings function.

Welcome back! Here's a quick hit that falls into the "make notes and share them" category.