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PowerShell v4 Desired State Configuration Deep Dive

During my time at Microsoft TechEd many new things were announced. My all time favorite announcement was PowerShell v4. There are many great things coming out with PowerShell v4, things that I haven’t really gotten a chance to dig into much yet. However the one of the few things I have run through would be the Desired State Configuration which I will refer to as DSC throughout this blog.

DSC is a way to manage the configuration for multiple servers utilizing a single script for the deployment. In the example I will use is managing an IIS Configuration across multiple servers. However as the DSC is developed there will be other usability options for this. …

PowerShell v4 Ping and Telnet Replacement

Note: Article Written on Server 2012 R2 Preview Build, the functionality may change when released.

I have been waiting for years for a good replacement for what Telnet and Ping provide me. I am thrilled to announce today I discovered a legitimate replacement has come down the line! Recently Microsoft released the Preview of Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1. Packaged with those is PowerShell Version 4. I have not had a chance to do a deep dive into it yet. However, I have found out that there is a cool new cmdlet called Test-NetConnection.

Starting My Journey through #90Days2MCSA

Hello Everyone! I apologize for my months disappearance from blogging, it’s been a busy March and will continue to be busy throughout TechEd! That is not a bad thing, and I will strive to increase my blogging. One thing that is going to help me in the interim is my Journey to my Server 2012 MCSA!

Michael Bender along with MS Learning has made a push for people to obtain their MCSA with the #90Days2MCSA Challenge, this is a fantastic idea is a great way as a community for everyone to improve their skills.

I’d like to start off by saying I may be a featured certification success story on the 90Days2MCSA site; however I do not have my Server 2012 MCSA yet and that means I get to participate! I’ve been hiding in the shadows and doing some studying with the official Microsoft Press 70-417 Upgrading Your Skills to MCSA Windows Server 2012.

Perform Survey’s and Randomly Selecting Users – Using Office Web Apps

Next week we have the first Indianapolis PowerShell User Group meeting and I was tasked with getting the survey for our meetings setup. I did not want to follow the standard here is a piece of paper please fill out and turn back in. So I decided to use the “cloud” way of passing out surveys.

The nice thing about SkyDrive is the Office Web Apps. These web apps include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. With Excel you are able to create Survey’s and provide anyone the link. These surveys are saved in an Excel document and synced with any computer that you have SkyDrive running on. These documents are being saved to my local machine gives me the ability to execute a PowerShell script on them which will throw out winners from the list of people who submitted the survey.

Excel_Survey_WebApp

Lets start…