A command with name is already available on this system. This module may override the existing commands.

Today’s story is about me making assumptions on how things work based on the method’s name. As the blog post says, I want to focus on two similar methods – GetTempFileName() and GetRandomFileName(), when using PowerShell. Still, since those methods are .NET based, it applies to a whole range of other languages – C#, F#, VisualBasic, and all others that I’ve never used.

I’ve been working on cleaning up Group Policies for a couple of months. While it may seem trivial, things get complicated when you’re tasked with managing 5000 GPOs created over 15 years by multiple teams without any best practices in mind. While working on GPOZaurr (my new PowerShell module), I’ve noticed that the more code I wrote to manage those GPOs, the more I knew passing this knowledge to admins who will be executing this on a weekly/monthly basis is going to be a challenge. That’s why I’ve decided to follow a similar approach as my other Active Directory testing module called Testimo. I’ve created a single command that analyses Group Policies using different methods and shows views from different angles to deliver the full picture. On top of that, it provides a solution (or it tries to) so that it’s fairly easy to fix – as long as you agree with what it proposes.

Christmas time is upon us, and I’ve decided that my PSTeams module needs some love. I wrote it in late 2018 and updated it a few times at the beginning of 2019. This release hopefully is worth of having 1.0 version number. I don’t do that often and usually go for build numbers changes only, but Microsoft Teams message cards have their limits on functionality. Therefore, there are not many things that can be added unless Microsoft opens up and gives us all the cool features of Adaptive Cards. PSTeams module uses Webconnector to send messages to Teams. That method only supports Message Cards, which even Microsoft calls Legacy. But legacy doesn’t mean fully functional with some cool features of their own. If you’re new to PSTeams you may want to read those 2 posts below to get information how to set it up.

Virus Total is an excellent service. It’s a single place where hundreds of antivirus engines can verify if the file, URL, domain name, or IP Address is trusted or not. Of course, it’s not a silver bullet, but it brings tremendous value, and I often verify files I download before executing. Since I release a lot of new or updated PowerShell modules on a weekly/monthly basis, I thought it would be great to send newly released versions straight to Virus Total so I can have them checked before anyone executes them. I also hope to prevent false positives from some antivirus vendors that may tag my modules as malware because they haven’t seen the DLL or PowerShell module in this form before. I’ve seen it happen to DBATools, so why not try and push my modules before users even use them?

When I created ImagePlayground, I thought about how to show its usefulness to the general community. On how to deliver what PowerShell can do. Then I saw on some forum people asking BGInfo to expand and allow running PowerShell scripts so that the data on the BGInfo Wallpaper can be gathered from PowerShell rather than VBS. I thought this was a great idea to create BGInfo using PowerShell without the necessity of using BGInfo at all.

As you may know, PowerShell has multiple streams. Write-Output, Write-Error, Write-Warning, Write-Verbose, Write-Debug, and Write-Information. It also has Write-Host which until PowerShell 5 was a bit special. Since PowerShell 5.1 it’s a wrapper over Write-Information, so it doesn’t kill puppies anymore. While I could spend the next five pages trying to give my best and describe those streams, there are already many articles describing them in detail. Please check the following link if you need that information.

I saw this article by Altaro tweeted Building PowerShell Tools for MSPs: HTML Tables for Reporting, and it describes how you can create HTML emails with just a few lines of code. Luke created that article in 2018 (tweets from the archive I guess), but I just saw it now so thought I would make a slight comparison. In 2018 I would probably go the same way as shown by Luke Orellana, who takes a simple example of querying WMI to get disk drive sizes and send them over, formatted via Email.

When you’re using Office 365 and want to send an email, you have two choices SMTP or Microsoft Graph API, which is a “new” kid on the block. For some time, I’ve used Microsoft Graph exclusively to send emails in favor of SMTP as it’s much easier to manage and generally works over HTTPS. If you type in google “Send email graph API PowerShell,” you will get lots of hits as bloggers, and Microsoft has already covered this topic. It’s even more critical than ever because Basic Authentication is deprecated in Office 365. To help out with the transition, Microsoft even released its PowerShell module. With Send-MgUserMail proposed as a way to send emails via Graph API, you will notice it’s far from being easy & user-friendly. Over two years ago, I released a PowerShell module called Mailozaurr (some people may not like my modules’ naming – but that’s how I roll!). In a blog post, Mailozaurr – New mail toolkit (SMTP, IMAP, POP3) with support for oAuth 2.0 and GraphApi for PowerShell, I’ve shown a basic functionality on how to send emails using SMTP OAuth 2.0 or Graph API, which aims to be drag & drop replacement over Send-MailMessage and is supposed to be as simple as possible to send an email with a low effort and high readability. You can also read on sending emails using Graph API by Tony Redmond in his blog post Moving on from Send-MailMessage: Sending Email from PowerShell using the Graph API.

One of the most comfortable output’s in PowerShell to work and analyze data is Out-GridView. It’s handy as you can search, sort and have things done quicker than trying to do things in the console. However it’s currently not available in PowerShell Core (PowerShell 6+), and when it is available in PowerShell 7, it will NOT be cross-platform.  Since I had released Dashimo a few days ago, I thought it was trivial to make a simple command out of it that could solve this problem.

Some time ago I’ve wrote PowerShell way to get all information about Office 365 Service Health, and if you were thinking that I would try the same concept for Azure Services you were right. However, I failed. This is because Office 365 Health can be gathered using Microsoft Graph API, and Azure Health information, as far as I know, is not available in the form I wanted it. Azure Status is available as part of Azure Status website. Contrary to Office 365 health you don’t have to login to your Office 365 tenant to read it.

A few months ago when I first released Dashimo, I’ve promised that Charts will come. Unfortunately, time passed by, and there were no Charts in sight. It’s not that I didn’t want to deliver, I just wasn’t sure on the way I want to allow charts building. Today after playing with the idea for a while I’ve decided to release essential support for diagrams, with a couple of other fixes. Some of that stuff is already there for longer while I just never announced it. There are probably a lot of other hidden gems you may find if you explore PSWriteHTML or Dashimo.