My family has been out of town this week. Light bulb moment! It’s the perfect time to cut holes in sheetrock and drill holes in ceilings to install my home network gear. When we moved a couple of months ago, I literally threw the network equipment in a closet. I used the same equipment from my previous home except for a new cable modem. Specifically, the Motorola MB8600 which is gigabit capable since I now have gigabit Internet service. See “Deploy an Enterprise Grade Network in the Home for Less than $500” for more details about my network equipment. I was concerned that there might be c ..read more

As many of you know, I’m a Senior Content Developer for Azure PowerShell at Microsoft. Today we announced the Az.Tools.Migration PowerShell module which is a toolkit for automatically migrating your PowerShell scripts and modules from AzureRM to the Az PowerShell module. The video shown below demonstrates how to use this module: Be sure to see the official announcement that I wrote on the Microsoft Tech Community blog site. In addition to the PowerShell module, there is also a VS Code extension for performing the migration. If you have suggestions, experience problems, or have feedback, be sur ..read more

Windows 10 Enterprise edition version 2004 is used for the scenarios demonstrated in this blog article. If you’d like to follow along, you’ll also need to install PowerShell version 7 and the Az PowerShell module. As stated in the help for Connect-AzAccount, the UseDeviceAuthentication parameter is the default authentication type for PowerShell version 6 and higher. What this means is that you’re provided with a URL and a code. They’re used to authenticate with Azure when signing in interactively from PowerShell. By default, Windows PowerShell prompts you to sign in with a GUI: Replicating the ..read more

I’ve worked as an IT Pro since 1994, with the past fourteen years at the same employer and my last day with them was this past Friday. I’ve also been a Microsoft MVP for the past six years, the first two as a PowerShell MVP and the last four as a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP. Today is my last day as a Microsoft MVP because you can’t be an MVP if you work for Microsoft. As of tomorrow, Monday, March 23rd I’ll be embarking on a new chapter in my career as a Senior Content Developer for Azure PowerShell. I honestly wasn’t looking for a new position because I had a good job, making good mon ..read more

I’ve recently wondered how many service offerings Azure has. I’ve read anywhere from 150 to 600 and I even went so far as to ask an Azure Product Manager but still didn’t receive a clear answer. What I did find out is that Microsoft maintains an Azure services directory on their Azure products website. I figured that was a good place to start looking and while the website is informative, it didn’t provide a count of the service offerings. Manually counting them wouldn’t be an efficient or accurate way of accomplishing the task of determining how many services are offered so I decided to use Po ..read more

As I mentioned in a previous blog article, the AzureRM PowerShell module is only supported until December of 2020. It has been replaced by the Az PowerShell module which was introduced in December of 2018. On Twitter, I recently asked if anyone was still using the AzureRM module and what was keeping them from transitioning to the Az module. One of the responses I received was due to the amount of work and time invested in scripts based on the AzureRM module. The Az PowerShell module includes compatibility aliases for scripts written using the AzureRM PowerShell module. The compatibility aliase ..read more

The Az PowerShell module was released in December of 2018 and is now the recommended module for managing Microsoft Azure. AzureRM is the previous PowerShell module for managing Azure which has been deprecated but will continue to be supported until December of 2020. Windows PowerShell 5.1, PowerShell Core 6, PowerShell 7, and higher are supported by the Az PowerShell module. Windows 10 version 1607 and higher has Windows PowerShell 5.1 installed by default. Determine if the version of PowerShell you’re running meets the minimum requirements before attempting to install the Az PowerShell module ..read more

Back on November 25th of 2019, I made the list of one of the 30 Must-Follow Small Business IT Influencers. Here’s what their website had to say about me ..read more

I recently saw a tweet from Joel Bennett about the Az (Azure) PowerShell module being nothing more than an empty module that imports all of the modules for each Azure product. I decided to investigate. Joel’s statement is 100% accurate. Off-Topic: The searched for term is highlighted in each result when the previous command is run in PowerShell 7. One thing I don’t like about the Az module is the Import-Module statements use the RequiredVersion parameter. This means that even though I’ve updated the Az.Compute module to version 3.4.0, it’s going to load version 3.3.0 if I import the Az module ..read more

For Christmas, I received a CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 4GB Starter Kit with Clear Case (4GB RAM). The pictures in this blog article can be clicked on for a larger more detailed image. The kit contains everything you need minus an HDMI monitor and USB keyboard/mouse. It includes the Raspberry Pi 4b (I received the one with 4GB of RAM, but it’s also available with 1GB or 2GB of RAM), heatsinks, a power supply with a removable inline switch, case (I ordered the one with a clear case), case fan, micro HDMI to HDMI cable, micro SD card with NOOBS preinstalled (I ordered the one with a 32GB card), and a ..read more