#PSBlogWeek 2017 Recap

Posted on October 21, 2017  •  3 minutes  • 438 words

Yesterday was the end of the latest #PSBlogWeek . It was a great event, with five days worth of awesome PowerShell content coming out!

This is my recap of the week, with links to all of the articles (and bloggers) and my main takeaways.

Monday

Automating Chocolatey package internalizing with PowerShell by Dan Franciscus

First up on Monday, Dan discussed tooling for automating the process of getting Chocolatey packages loaded into your company’s private repository. This included identifying outdated packages and testing that they successfully install.

This post reminded me that I really need to give Chocolatey for Business a proper look.

Logging and Error Handling Best Practices for Automating Windows Update Installs (MSU) with wusa.exe (And For Logging Any Called Process) by Darwin Sanoy

Also on Monday, Darwin shared some of his logging (and error handling) best practices. The article is aimed at wusa.exe, but the takeaways from it can be applied everywhere! The main takeaway for me was that I need to up my logging game.

Tuesday

Creating Storage Reports With PowerShell by Me!

Since this was my article I won’t “review” it; if you’re reading this then chances are pretty high that you’ve already read it.

Wednesday

Using Desired State Configuration (DSC) Composite Resources by Josh Duffney

I’m just starting on my Desired State Configuration (DSC) journey at work, so the timing of Josh’s Wednesday post was great for me. He covered Composite Resources: what they are, how to create them, and how to use them.

Thursday

Migration of SQL Server with PowerShell dbatools by Volker Bachmann

Thursday saw Volker demonstrate SQL Server migration with the dbatools module. My work tasks don’t generally extend very far into the “application” layer, especially where SQL is concerned so the dbatools module haven’t been too far up on my person “to learn” list. This post, however, made me realise I need to send some info through to our applications team.

Friday

Using PowerShell to create a vCloud Director Tenant HTML Report by Markus Kraus

And wrapping up the week on friday, Markus created HTML reports for vCloud Director. I’ve had no exposure to this particular VMware product… but regardless holy cow those reports look good!

I’m certainly going to be making use of PowerStart HTML early next week.

Thanks

Fist of all thanks to Adam for putting on the event and to all of the bloggers for taking part and producing some awesome content.

But also, thanks for the wider PowerShell (and possibly non-PowerShell) community out there who read the articles, provided feedback, and liked, shared or otherwise interacted with all of us on various social media sites.