Try/Catch works in PowerShell ISE and not in PowerShell console

30th of May, 2017 / / No Comments

I recently encountered an issue with one of my PowerShell scripts. It was a script to enable litigation hold on all mailboxes in Exchange Online.
I connected to Exchange Online via the usual means below.

$creds = Get-Credential
$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $Creds -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $session -AllowClobber

I then attempted to execute the following with no success.

try
{
Set-Mailbox -Identity $user.UserPrincipalName -LitigationHoldEnabled $true -ErrorAction Stop
}
catch
{
Write-Host "ERROR!"
… [Keep reading] “Try/Catch works in PowerShell ISE and not in PowerShell console”

How to create and auto update route tables in Azure for your local Azure datacentre with Azure Automation, bypassing firewall appliances

24th of May, 2017 / / 2 Comments

When deploying an “edge” or “perimeter” network in Azure, by way of a peered edge VNET or an edge subnet, you’ll likely want to deploy virtual firewall appliances of some kind to manage and control that ingress and egress traffic. This comes at a cost though. That cost being that Azure services are generally accessed via public IP addresses or hosts, even within Azure. The most common of those and one that has come up recently is Azure Blob storage.… [Keep reading] “How to create and auto update route tables in Azure for your local Azure datacentre with Azure Automation, bypassing firewall appliances”

Synchronizing Exchange Online/Office 365 User Profile Photos with FIM/MIM

23rd of May, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

This is Part Two in the two-part blog post on managing users profile photos with Microsoft FIM/MIM. Part one here detailed managing users Azure AD/Active Directory profile photo. This post delves deeper into photos, specifically around Office 365 and the reason why you may want to manage these via FIM/MIM.

Background

User profile photos should be simple to manage. But in a rapidly moving hybrid cloud world it can be a lot more complex than it needs to be.… [Keep reading] “Synchronizing Exchange Online/Office 365 User Profile Photos with FIM/MIM”

Message retry patterns in Azure Functions

22nd of May, 2017 / / 3 Comments

Azure Functions provide ServiceBus based trigger bindings that allow us to process messages dropped onto a SB queue or delivered to a SB subscription. In this post we’ll walk through creating an Azure Function using a ServiceBus trigger that implements a configurable message retry pattern.
Note: This post is not an introduction to Azure Functions nor an introduction to ServiceBus. For those not familiar will these Azure services take a look at the Azure Documentation Centre.… [Keep reading] “Message retry patterns in Azure Functions”

A quick start guide to leveraging the Azure Graph API with PowerShell and oAuth 2.0

22nd of May, 2017 / / 1 Comment 
Update Oct 2019: See this post for simplifying oAuth Authentication to Microsoft Graph using PowerShell and the MSAL (Microsoft Authentication Libraries)

Introduction

In September 2016 I wrote this post detailing integrating with the Azure Graph API via PowerShell and oAuth 2.0.

Since that point in time I’ve found myself doing considerably more via PowerShell and the Graph API using oAuth. I regularly find myself leveraging previous scripts to generate a new script for the initial connection.… [Keep reading] “A quick start guide to leveraging the Azure Graph API with PowerShell and oAuth 2.0”

API Mocking for Developers

18th of May, 2017 / / 2 Comments

API is the most common practice to exchange messages in a microservices architecture world. There are actually two different approaches for API development. One is called Model First and the other is called Design First. Usually the latter, AKA Spec-Driven Development (SDD), is preferred over the former.
When is the Model First approach useful? If you are running legacy API applications, this would be a good example of using this approach. If those systems are well documented, API documents can be easily extracted by tools like Swagger which is now renamed to Open API.… [Keep reading] “API Mocking for Developers”

Using the Lithnet PowerShell Modules to generate full object metadata FIM/MIM HTML Reports

11th of May, 2017 / / No Comments


How many times have you wanted a consolidated report out of FIM/MIM for an object? What connectors does it have, what are the values of the attributes, which Management Agent contributed the value(s) and when? Individually of course you can get that info using the Metaverse Search and looking at the object in MIM Portal. But what if you wanted it all with a single query? This blog post provides an approach to doing just that.… [Keep reading] “Using the Lithnet PowerShell Modules to generate full object metadata FIM/MIM HTML Reports”

Scripting queries for Lithnet Get-MVObject searches into the Microsoft Identity Manager Metaverse

10th of May, 2017 / / No Comments

It probably seems obvious by now, but I seem to live in PowerShell and Microsoft Identity Manager. I’m forever looking into the Microsoft Identity Manager Metaverse for objects.
However, sometimes I get tripped up by the differences in Object Classes between the FIM/MIM Service and the Metaverse, the names of the Object Classes (obviously not Person, Group and Contact) and in situations where they are case-sensitive.  If you’re using the Sync Service Manager Metaverse Search function though you get a pick list.… [Keep reading] “Scripting queries for Lithnet Get-MVObject searches into the Microsoft Identity Manager Metaverse”

Know Your Cloud Resource Costs on Azure

5th of May, 2017 / / No Comments

An organisation used to invest their IT infrastructure mostly for computers, network or data centre. Over time, they spent their budget for hosting spaces. Nowadays, in cloud environments, they mostly spend their funds to purchase computing power. Here’s a simple diagram about the cloud computing evolution. From left to right, expenditure shifts from infrastructure to computing power.

In the cloud environment, when we need resources, we just create and use them, and when we don’t need them any longer, we just delete them.… [Keep reading] “Know Your Cloud Resource Costs on Azure”

Precompiled Azure Functions Revisited

3rd of May, 2017 / / No Comments

Since Microsoft released a preview version of Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions in December, 2016, it’s been reported very buggy. Current roadmap says the tooling won’t be unveiled until .NET Standard 2.0 is released. Therefore, Azure App Service Team published an article to utilise ASP.NET Web Application projects in the meantime. Even though the approach requires a lot of hands for initial setup, this is literally the only way to play Azure Functions on Visual Studio without the tooling.… [Keep reading] “Precompiled Azure Functions Revisited”