The SynEdgy team announced the return of PSConfEU MiniCon 2026 for October 13, delivering a full follow the sun schedule designed to keep live community talks accessible across every time zone. Attendees gather in the Gather spatial venue PSWorld for interactive sessions and spontaneous networking, featuring deep dives into Pester 6, module automation pipelines, and DSCv3 authoring.

👉 PSConfEU MiniCon 2026

PowerShell Community Call for September 2026

Sean Wheeler hosted the September 2026 PowerShell Community Call featuring demos of DSC 3.4 preview 1 alongside major community updates across module tooling. Highlights include Steve Lee demonstrating an adapter that turns Windows administrative templates into DSC resources and Fabian Bader walking through converting hundreds of Microsoft 365 DSC resources to class based architecture.

Justin Grote on Coding Agents, Sandboxing, and Burnout

Justin Grote rejoined the PowerShell Podcast to break down the fast moving world of agentic AI and his workflow running coding agents inside isolated dev boxes and spot VMs so runaway commands never hit bare metal.

Replacing slmgr.vbs with the OSLicense Module

Harm Veenstra at PowerShell is fun walks through retiring slmgr.vbs ahead of the VBScript removal timeline by switching to the built in OSLicense module.

👉 https://powershellisfun.com/2026/09/25/slmgr-vbs-replacement-in-powershell-using-the-oslicense-module/

Arturo Lucatero on Coding Agents and Secret Sprawl

Entra.News - Your weekly dose of Microsoft Entra

Your AI Coding Agent Is Creating Secrets You Don’t Know About

Ask a coding agent to build something that talks to another service and watch what it does. It creates a client secret. Then another one. As Arturo Lucatero puts it, next thing you know you have ten secrets that were created without you knowing about it. At the speed AI is moving, he thinks we could be cleaning up a few million new secrets within six mo…

Listen now

5 days ago · 5 likes · Merill Fernando

Arturo Lucatero joined Merill Fernando on Entra.Chat to sound the alarm on AI coding agents quietly generating piles of client secrets instead of using modern identity standards.

Jeff Hicks on Content Compression with Zippy and Git Tips

Jeff Hicks at Behind the PowerShell Pipeline rounds out the month with a practical workflow for serving random repository tips directly in your console profile and an exploration of the Zippy module.

👉 https://buttondown.com/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/september-2026-powershell-potluck/

Scoping Interactive Graph Sessions with Custom Entra Apps

Tony Redmond at Office 365 for IT Pros breaks down how to replace the default Microsoft Graph Command Line Tools enterprise app with custom registered apps to enforce least privilege access.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/09/24/interactive-graph-sessions-apps/

Repo Roundup

• Chrissy LeMaire opened the most important issue of the week on Friday: dbatools is staying free, open source, and MIT-licensed. Devolutions is funding dbatools.pro, a separate commercial product built on top of dbatools, and building it is now her full-time job. The repo already shows what that means, with 38 pushes and nine issues closed since. After dbatools 2.9.0 and mssqlsuite v2, that’s three straight weeks of news from her. 👉 https://github.com/dataplat/dbatools/issues/10740

• Merill Fernando started four repos on Monday: learn-mirror, plus mirrors of the Entra, Defender, and Intune docs rebuilt from Microsoft Learn with one commit per change. The Entra mirror’s README says it stands in for MicrosoftDocs/entra-docs “for when that repository stops being public.” If you rely on git history to see what changed in the docs, star these now. Fabian Bader already did. 👉 https://github.com/merill/learn-mirror

• Maester 2.3 is close. Merill opened the release post PR today and four previews went out the same day. Nathan McNulty landed retries for transient Graph 500s and 502s and a fallback for when PIM rejects the license, and Fabian Bader merged HTML encoding for Send-MtMail. Three roster members in one repo in one week. 👉 https://github.com/maester365/maester/pull/2288

• Doug Finke released PSAISuite v0.9.0 on Monday and v0.9.1 on Tuesday. 0.9.0 adds New-AgentHarness -Prompt and an interactive agent mode, and 0.9.1 fixes Anthropic thinking-token exhaustion. Two releases in two days. 👉 https://github.com/dfinke/psaisuite/releases/tag/v0.9.1

• Doug also made PSAIPerplexityDecisions public today and started PSAICloudflareClef alongside it. Same idea as Jev last week, typed yes/no, choice, and score questions that return structured decisions, now against Perplexity and Cloudflare back ends. He’s building one decisions module per provider, and Jev itself got submitted to three awesome-jev lists. 👉 https://github.com/dfinke/PSAIPerplexityDecisions

• Gilbert Sanchez shipped PSDepend 0.6.0 yesterday with NuGet version ranges for Chocolatey dependencies, then opened a PR for npm-style lock files with transitive resolution. Update-PSDependLock writes a requirements.lock.json so every machine installs the same versions. Lock files are the thing PSDepend never had. He also kept the PSKoans streak alive with the Show-Karma fix. 👉 https://github.com/PowerShellOrg/PSDepend/pull/203

• Steve Lee opened a DSC PR on Friday that adds a new Actions kind of resource, with dsc action list and server APIs to invoke them. Last week was post-3.3.0 cleanup, this week is the next big thing. Michał Machniak opened docs for the Windows Update resource the same day. 👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/DSC/pull/1734

• Jake Hildreth built Vixel, a terminal app for drawing pixel art with vim-style controls, and merged eight PRs into it this week. He also finished porting ttf2flf from a PowerShell module to a C# tool on Tuesday, then opened and closed more than thirty issues against it. Stepper got a script integrity lifecycle too. Easily the busiest feed on the roster. 👉 https://github.com/jakehildreth/Vixel

• Michael Grafnetter’s OktaHound 2.9.0 from last week turned out to be the final release. The tool is deprecated in favor of the OpenHound Okta collector. 👉 https://github.com/SpecterOps/openhound-okta

• Nathan McNulty opened five PRs on XDRInternals, led by a read-only MCP server with 21 bounded Defender portal reads. He also merged 21 PRs into defender-reporting, 30 into research-passkeys, and five into azd-santa, the Santa template from last week. 👉 https://github.com/MSCloudInternals/XDRInternals/pull/134

• Fred Weinmann took EntraAuth.Azure from 1.1.5 to 1.1.10 yesterday, adding Get-EaaRoleAssignment, New-EaaRoleAssignment, and Search-EaaGraph. InformationProtection got three version bumps Friday for -LiteralPath support. And the DuckDB work from last week showed up somewhere useful: he fixed a DuckDB memory leak in zerotrustassessment. 👉 https://github.com/FriedrichWeinmann/EntraAuth.Azure

• Jos Lieben pushed AzCmply to 1.0.6 a week after making it public, shipped M365AutoLink 1.5.0 today with sync budgets, and started LiebenToolkit. Fourth week on the roster, fourth week of output. 👉 https://github.com/jflieben/AzCmply

• Aleksandar Nikolić reported that Microsoft.Graph.Authentication fails after you remove and re-import it in the same PowerShell session. Worth knowing before the SDK’s 2.41.0 lands. He also spent the week reviewing zerotrustassessment PRs. 👉 https://github.com/microsoftgraph/msgraph-sdk-powershell/issues/3805

• Tyler Leonhardt closed a long-standing VS Code request today: multiple GitHub Enterprise servers at once. The new github-enterprise.uris setting takes a list of instances and he says it ships in 1.141. 👉 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/277435

• Marc-André Moreau reworked copilot-resources into a plugin that runs GitHub Copilot CLI from Claude Code, Codex, and now Cursor through shared PowerShell 7 bridges. Eight PRs merged since Monday, plus two PRs upstream to Turso. 👉 https://github.com/awakecoding/copilot-resources

Events

PSConfEU MiniCon | October 13th 👉 PSConfEU MiniCon 2026

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference 👉 https://psconf.eu/

Live dbatools AMA Webinar with the Core Team | Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT

👉 https://shorturl.at/N53tz

jshigetomi at GitHub shipped PowerShell 7.7.0-preview.5, packing early access updates for .NET SDK 11 alongside Microsoft.PowerShell.PSResourceGet 1.3.0-preview2. Key operational fixes include letting users force implicit formatting to AutoSize, tolerating configuration read errors in powershell.config.json, and improving remote prompt handling for PSCredential and SecureString arrays.

👉 v7.7.0-preview.5 Release of PowerShell

Living Off the Land With Spencer Alessi

Spencer Alessi joined my friend Andrew Pla on The PowerShell Podcast to break down where PowerShell fits into modern offensive security fresh off DEF CON. He shares how both attackers and defenders lean on built in tooling, how language models speed up his script development, and what specific hardening steps make an Active Directory environment genuinely painful to compromise.

Desired State Configuration v3.3.0 Hits General Availability

Jason Helmick on the Microsoft PowerShell Team Blog announced the General Availability of Desired State Configuration v3.3.0, delivering new built in Windows resources alongside official Linux packages. This update introduces a registry backed adapter for cleaner configuration mapping, expands --what-if support to services and firewall rules, and stabilizes expression functions to easily catch state changes or pending restarts.

👉 Announcing Microsoft Desired State Configuration v3.3.0

Repo Roundup

• Michael Grafnetter shipped OktaHound 2.9.0 under SpecterOps yesterday. He’d been building openhound-okta on Monday before the release landed in the SpecterOps org. The DSInternals author now shipping releases in SpecterOps’ attack-path tooling is a real escalation of the passkey and identity attack research thread he started in August. 👉 https://github.com/SpecterOps/OktaHound/releases/tag/2.9.0

• Chrissy LeMaire released mssqlsuite v2 on Tuesday, a week after dbatools 2.9.0. Back-to-back weeks of shipping. 👉 https://github.com/potatoqualitee/mssqlsuite/releases/tag/v2

• Stephen Valdinger released chocolatey-au-action 3.0 on Monday under the chocolatey-community org. Second appearance in the leads column after Splitter, so he’s shipping steadily now. 👉 https://github.com/chocolatey-community/chocolatey-au-action/releases/tag/3.0

• Doug Finke made Jev public. It turns messy input into decisions your PowerShell scripts can act on, asking typed yes/no, choice, and score questions and returning structured decisions. He surfaced the experiments repo Monday and the real project Tuesday. This is the most interesting new PowerShell module of the week. 👉 https://github.com/dfinke/Jev

• Jos Lieben made AzCmply public on Tuesday and spent the week triaging assortedFunctionsV2. Third week on the roster, third week of output. 👉 https://github.com/jflieben/AzCmply

• Aleksandar Nikolić started powershell-skills, an Agent Plugins 1.0 package for PowerShell 7 development with reusable skills and an optional psmcp-builtin MCP server for parsing script text and discovering commands, metadata, and help. Version 0.1.0, Windows x64. From one of the longest-tenured MVPs on the roster, this is worth a close look. 👉 https://github.com/alexandair/powershell-skills

• Sam Erde built DLLPickle, a module that gets you un-stuck from dependency version conflicts when connecting to multiple Microsoft online services. Anyone who has fought Graph and Exchange Online assembly conflicts in the same session knows exactly why this exists. 👉 https://github.com/SamErde/DLLPickle

• Nathan McNulty started azd-santa, an Azure Developer CLI template for deploying North Pole Security’s Santa to Intune-managed macOS devices, with a staged approach starting in Monitor mode. macOS binary authorization via Intune is a gap nobody’s filled well. 👉 https://github.com/nathanmcnulty/azd-santa

• Fabian Bader made pimjustification.com public, a static Entra PIM justification generator with 600 pre-authored reasons across six sarcasm levels. He also kept pushing longestgraphcmdlet.com. The man is building a small empire of Entra joke sites that are also genuinely useful. 👉 https://github.com/f-bader/pimjustification.com

• Rob Sewell had a big DataSpeakers week, five pushes Monday and Tuesday plus garmin-grafana work. First substantial appearance from him in these sweeps. 👉 https://github.com/SQLDBAWithABeard/DataSpeakers

• Fred Weinmann started DuckDB.Client yesterday. A DuckDB client from the PSFramework author, right after making EntraAuth.Azure public last week. 👉 https://github.com/FriedrichWeinmann/DuckDB.Client

• Tyler Leonhardt is deep in agent-host-protocol, assigning PRs Monday and pushing Tuesday alongside vscode work. Worth watching what that protocol becomes. 👉 https://github.com/TylerLeonhardt

• PSKoans keeps getting love. Chris Dent pushed it Sunday, following Andrew Pla and Gilbert Sanchez’s maintainer burst last week. 👉 https://github.com/vexx32/PSKoans

• Steve Lee spent Friday and Saturday on DSC post-3.3.0 cleanup. Anam Navied worked PSResourceGet and PowerShellGet Monday with Sydney Smith triaging PSResourceGet issues Wednesday. Dongbo Wang opened three PowerShell PRs Wednesday. Patrick Meinecke on PowerShell PR #28041. Sean Wheeler pushed four docs repos Tuesday. Chris Bergmeister back in PSScriptAnalyzer Tuesday on PR #2122. Adam Driscoll had a six-push playmagic Friday. Frank Lesniak on EFingPlanner today, a family travel planner he’s explicitly labeled as not maintained. Björn Sundling opened an azure-devops-docs PR today. Emanuel Palm on AzBobbyTables Friday. Merill Fernando on Maester and graph-permissions-explorer. Fabien Tschanz on mgx and Microsoft365DSC. Will Schroeder pushed Nemesis. Peter van der Woude pushed his blog, first activity since joining the roster. Jake Hildreth on Stepper Friday. Brad Wyatt on Rest-Client and swoosh. Jorge Suarez closing EndpointJobs issues. Maurice Daly on DriverAutomationTool.

Dispatch From Workplace Ninjas Summit 2026

Harm Veenstra at PowerShell is fun delivers an exhaustive recap of Workplace Ninjas Summit 2026 in Switzerland, detailing community announcements alongside his sessions with David Segura on new OSDeploy tools and OSDCloud Community Edition. Beyond deployment tooling, the writeup packages practical takeaways across modern endpoint management, spanning Intune application install failures, passkey attack vectors, and macOS fleet hardening.

👉 Workplace Ninjas Summit 2026 Recap

Preparing for the Microsoft Graph PowerShell 5.1 Cutoff

Endpoint Weekly breaks down the impending retirement of Windows PowerShell 5.1 support in Microsoft Graph PowerShell ahead of the version 3 release in late 2026. The explainer warns engineers to bypass version 7.4 entirely in favor of PowerShell 7.6 to avoid immediate end of support overlaps, while highlighting critical workarounds for the Intune management extension where scripts remain hardcoded to legacy executables.

Building a Terminal PowerShell IDE With Neovim

Andrew Mallett at theurbanpenguin demonstrates how to turn Neovim into a full terminal development environment for PowerShell on Ubuntu 26.04. He wires up nvim-lspconfig to PowerShell Editor Services, walking through how native Language Server Protocol integration delivers syntax diagnostics, hover documentation, and command completion directly inside the console.

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Live dbatools AMA Webinar with the Core Team | Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT

An open Ask Me Anything with the people behind dbatools, the open source PowerShell toolkit for SQL Server administration, migration, and automation. Whether you already lean on dbatools every day or are still on the fence about getting started, this is the format where you get to put your specific questions in front of the people who wrote the answers. Speakers include Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret, Chrissy LeMaire, Andreas Jordan, and Cláudio Silva.
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT
Where: Online, see the link for details

👉 https://shorturl.at/N53tz

Barry Gervin and Gavin Barron on the Microsoft 365 Developer Blog have announced a 12-month retirement window for Windows PowerShell 5.x in the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. Read the fine print before you panic: retirement here means maintenance, not compatibility. The v2.x modules will still declare 5.1 support and still get security fixes, but new features, bug fixes, and validation all move to PowerShell 7, and any issue that only reproduces on 5.1 will no longer be investigated. The hard cutoff lands in Q4 CY2026 with v3.0.0, which drops 5.x entirely and freezes the v2 line except for security patches. Microsoft PowerShell MVP Sam Erde calls this a good thing, and his reasoning is worth reading: 5.1 compatibility has held Graph and other modules back from PowerShell 7’s performance gains, and going 7-only finally lets Microsoft adopt Assembly Load Context in the module, which is the real fix for the MSAL and dependency DLL conflicts that have plagued the SDK on .NET Framework for years. He also makes the case that a single target platform simplifies unit tests, CI pipelines, troubleshooting, and docs. The practical takeaway: audit every scheduled task, runbook, and Azure Automation account still invoking Graph from 5.1, pin v2.x where you can’t migrate yet, and move the rest to 7.x now while both still work side by side. Sam’s closing question is the right one to ask your team this week: have you stopped writing for 5.1 yet?

👉 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/investing-in-a-more-reliable-microsoft-graph-powershell-experience/

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7506450102660718593/

Repo Roundup

• Steve Lee shipped DSC v3.3.0 This is the GA after weeks of rc builds, and it caps a story that’s been running across this roster all summer. He spent Tuesday and Wednesday closing out DSC PR #1723 and filing final issues before the tag.
  👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/DSC/releases/tag/v3.3.0
  

• Chrissy LeMaire released dbatools v2.9.0 on Wednesday. That’s what all those mysterious multi-push dbatools days have been building toward for the last month.
  👉 https://github.com/dataplat/dbatools/releases/tag/v2.9.0
  

• Doug Finke released psaisuite v0.8.10 today, plus a push to dougfinke.dev on Tuesday. Eight point releases in five weeks.
  👉 https://github.com/dfinke/psaisuite/releases/tag/v0.8.10
  

• Adam Driscoll released SQLite Browser v0.1 on Tuesday, a cross-platform desktop app for creating, inspecting, querying, and editing SQLite databases. It’s a clean C# and Avalonia port of DB Browser for SQLite, and the database provider is Devolutions Ahtola, an experimental engine. He also made a repo called playmagic public today.
  👉 https://github.com/adamdriscoll/sqlitebrowser/releases/tag/v0.1
  

• Fred Weinmann made EntraAuth.Azure public on Wednesday, after a week of DomainManagement issue work. A new Entra auth module from the PSFramework and ADMF author is worth watching.
  👉 https://github.com/FriedrichWeinmann/EntraAuth.Azure
  

• Sam Erde had a heavy Wednesday on TheCleaners, which is already on the PowerShell Gallery. Six pushes in a sitting.
  👉 https://github.com/SamErde/TheCleaners
  

• Michael Grafnetter is deep in passkey attack research. He pushed DSInternals on Friday, spent the weekend on pass-the-passkey, and today opened a PR on OktaHound. The FIDO and WebAuthn thread he started in August is turning into something substantial.
  👉 https://github.com/MichaelGrafnetter/pass-the-passkey
  

• Chris Bergmeister resurfaced with a big PSScriptAnalyzer day on Monday, six pushes. He’s been quiet in these sweeps for weeks, and Sean Wheeler was in PSScriptAnalyzer too on Wednesday and yesterday, including three comments on PR #2196. Two people converging on the linter usually means a release is coming.
  👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/PSScriptAnalyzer
  

• PSKoans got a burst of attention. Andrew Pla spent Wednesday triaging issues, and Gilbert Sanchez opened a PR plus issues today. The PowerShell learning project getting maintainer love is good news for anyone onboarding people.
  👉 https://github.com/vexx32/PSKoans
  

• Frank Lesniak built copilot-repo-template, a repository scaffold template, with three pushes yesterday. Consistent with his style-guide work: unglamorous infrastructure nobody else builds.
  👉 https://github.com/franklesniak/copilot-repo-template
  

• Jos Lieben pushed LiebenToolkit and M365AutoLink on Monday and triaged assortedFunctionsV2 on Wednesday.
  👉 https://github.com/jflieben/LiebenToolkit
  

• Nathan McNulty added azd-global-secure-access and azd-auth-notifications to the azd family this week, plus more azd-reference work. 👉 https://github.com/nathanmcnulty/azd-global-secure-access

Simplifying Microsoft 365 DSC Deployments

Constantin Hager joined Andrew Pla on the PowerShell Podcast to discuss Microsoft 365 DSC and his journey to becoming a Microsoft MVP. He breaks down how the community driven workshop project bypasses massive whitepaper setups by using automated lab scripts and YAML files to manage multi tenant tenant drift and configuration pipelines.

Supercharging Your PowerShell Prompt

Jeff Hicks at Behind the PowerShell Pipeline digs into customizing the default prompt function to surface practical session context without slowing down your console. He demonstrates how swapping verbose session state calls for built in automatic variables lets you cleanly display timestamps, shortened paths, and status characters every time you press enter.

👉 https://buttondown.com/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/powershell-prompt-potential/

Cutting Help Desk Queue Times with Practical One-Liners

TrevTech breaks down seven essential PowerShell commands designed to clear daily support queues before your morning coffee gets cold. Rather than just handing out one-liners, the real value lies in how he interprets the return data to uncover recurring lockout devices, identify missing token refreshes on file shares, and audit orphaned local administrator accounts.

Managing the KB5129195 Emergency Update

Imran Awan at EndpointWeekly breaks down the surprise out of band update for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 aimed at resolving regressions introduced by the September Patch Tuesday release. The critical takeaway centers on deployment mechanics, warning admins that newer Windows Autopatch policies default out of band releases to manual approval, leaving affected Remote Desktop Services hosts unpatched until explicitly approved.

👉 https://endpointweekly.com/blog/kb5129195-emergency-update-intune-autopatch-rds-fix.html

High Performance PowerShell and Modern Module Architecture

Justin Grote joined Constantin Hager at the German PowerShell User Group to explore strategies for building performant PowerShell modules and eliminating execution bottlenecks. He dives into practical concurrency patterns and asynchronous operations across .NET, detailing how tools like ModuleFast and ExcelFast leverage memory streams and optimized pipelines to speed up heavy workloads.

Patch Tuesday Volume Spikes and Endpoint Health Checks

Brock and Josh joined Andrew Pla on PDQ Live to unpack September’s massive Patch Tuesday drop along with an all in one endpoint diagnostic script. The team analyzed why soaring vulnerability counts often amount to manageable operational noise, followed by a live demonstration of a customizable 77 point PowerShell health check designed to audit local admins, pending reboots, and configuration drift.

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Live dbatools AMA Webinar with the Core Team | Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT

An open Ask Me Anything with the people behind dbatools, the open source PowerShell toolkit for SQL Server administration, migration, and automation. Whether you already lean on dbatools every day or are still on the fence about getting started, this is the format where you get to put your specific questions in front of the people who wrote the answers. Speakers include Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret, Chrissy LeMaire, Andreas Jordan, and Cláudio Silva.
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT
Where: Online, see the link for details

👉 https://shorturl.at/N53tz

jshigetomi shipped a wave of servicing updates across the PowerShell repository on GitHub, rolling out releases for v7.4.20, v7.5.11, and v7.6.6 alongside the fresh v7.7.0-preview.4 build. The stable patches bring vital pipeline fixes and underlying runtime bumps up to .NET SDK 10.0.401, while v7.6.6 specifically resolves a FileOnlyEntry crash on older Windows releases.

👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases

Guerrilla 2.54.0 is on the PowerShell Gallery

Yours truly shipped Guerrilla 2.54.0 is on the PowerShell Gallery with four new Google Workspace checks, closing the CISA SCuBA Drive policies that only bind when external sharing is turned on.

DRIVE-019 checks that users are warned before sharing outside the organization. DRIVE-020 that sharing is limited to people who actually hold a Google account, rather than a visitor link with a PIN. DRIVE-021 that publishing files to the open web is off, and DRIVE-022 that nobody can move your content into a shared drive owned by another organization.

All four read a policy the scan already collects, so there is no new API scope and no new delegation to grant.

The part I care about is what they say when the control does not apply. Block external sharing entirely and none of those four mean anything, so the check tells you that instead of returning a bare pass that looks identical to somebody having verified the setting.

SCuBA Google Workspace coverage is now 110 of 138.

Install-Module Guerrilla

👉 https://github.com/jimrtyler/guerrilla

👉 https://guerrilla.army

Ditching the Calculator for PowerShell

Harm Veenstra at PowerShell is fun breaks down how to run everyday math directly in the console instead of reaching for a phone calculator. The post covers arithmetic operator precedence, straightforward storage unit conversions from megabytes to terabytes, and calculating intervals between dates using Get-Date and New-TimeSpan.

👉 https://powershellisfun.com/2026/09/10/calculating-in-powershell/

Solving Practical Problems with David McFall

David McFall joined Andrew Pla on The PowerShell Podcast to break down how administrators can extract massive value from automation without needing to be scripting experts. He highlights practical wins across Active Directory, Microsoft Graph, and PDQ, focusing on device posture reporting and surfacing hardware gaps to streamline daily systems management.

Why Microsoft Graph Rejects Group Mailboxes

Tony Redmond at Office 365 for IT Pros breaks down why running cmdlets like Get-MgUserMailFolder against Microsoft 365 Groups throws an ErrorInvalidUser failure. The limitation comes down to architectural identity design, because the Graph Outlook Mail API strictly targets user accounts while Outlook desktop relies on private internal endpoints to render group mailbox content.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/09/09/group-mailbox-graph-api/

Fake Captchas Turn PowerShell Into an Enterprise Gateway

Alexander Culafi at Dark Reading breaks down TerminalFix, a social engineering campaign that tricks users into pasting clipboard code into Windows Terminal to solve fake Cloudflare prompts. The payload drops a stealthy DLL sideloading chain and an encrypted reverse tunnel, handing attackers direct network access before defenders realize anything ran.

👉 https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/terminalfix-campaign-weaponizes-powershell-enterprise-attacks

Formatting the Win32_Process Object

Jeff Hicks at Behind the PowerShell Pipeline breaks down how to make custom Win32_Process objects look and feel just like standard Get-Process output. He demonstrates extracting native formatting directives with Get-FormatData and exporting them directly to format.ps1xml files, bypassing the old manual XML authoring process entirely.

👉 Behind the PowerShell Pipeline

Essential PowerShell Commands for IT Support

IT Edge Network covers five fundamental PowerShell commands every desktop support technician needs for quick triage. The walkthrough highlights practical troubleshooting wins using Get-ComputerInfo, Get-Service, Get-Process, Get-NetIPConfiguration, and Test-Connection to rapidly gather hardware details, verify network reachability, and diagnose frozen applications right from the console.

Hardening Entra GSA Client Deployment in Intune

Richard Hicks over breaks down critical production flaws in Microsoft’s sample Intune installation script for the Entra Global Secure Access client. His refactored version prevents broken network configurations by preserving existing IPv6 DisabledComponents registry flags, validates the installer Authenticode signature, and routes transcripts straight into the Intune Management Extension diagnostic logs.

👉 https://directaccess.richardhicks.com/2026/08/31/entra-global-secure-access-gsa-client-intune-deployment-powershell-script/

Repo Roundup

• Doug Finke released psaisuite v0.8.8 on Sunday. Seven point releases in a month on the AI provider abstraction module. 👉 https://github.com/dfinke/psaisuite/releases/tag/v0.8.8

• Michał Machniak surfaced PowerShell.IGA.AccessGuard on Sunday with three pushes. Identity governance and administration tooling in PowerShell, which is a new direction for him after months of DSC v3 work on ADSGroupPolicyDSCv3. Worth watching what it becomes. 👉 https://github.com/mimachniak/PowerShell.IGA.AccessGuard

• Fabian Bader built longestgraphcmdlet.com. Four pushes on Friday to what is either a very funny bit or a genuinely useful reference, and possibly both. Anyone who has typed Get-MgBetaDeviceManagementDeviceConfigurationDeviceStatusOverview knows the premise writes itself. 👉 https://github.com/f-bader/longestgraphcmdlet.com

• Simon Wåhlin started subnetcalc on Monday. New repo from the PSBicep maintainer. 👉 https://github.com/SimonWahlin/subnetcalc

• Frank Lesniak spent the back half of the week on TerraformStyleGuide, four days running with PR #37 discussion on Thursday. The style guide work continues to be some of the most quietly useful output on this roster. 👉 https://github.com/franklesniak/TerraformStyleGuide

• Jake Hildreth kept at Stepper on Friday with pushes and branch cleanup. The resumable step by step scripting module is getting sustained attention rather than a one week burst. 👉 https://github.com/jakehildreth/Stepper

• James Petty opened issues and pushed PSTimers and TMPowerShell26 on Wednesday. The TMPowerShell26 repo name suggests conference material in progress. 👉 https://github.com/psjamesp/TMPowerShell26

• Michael Grafnetter had a busy week. Forked TrustedSec’s Titanis on Thursday, pushed DSInternals on Friday, then opened issues against both PowerShellGallery and reproducible-builds. The supply chain reproducibility thread is the interesting one to follow. 👉 https://github.com/MichaelGrafnetter/DSInternals

• The Microsoft PowerShell team converged on Tuesday the 8th. Dongbo Wang pushing PowerShell with four new branches, Patrick Meinecke in PowerShell and then PowerShellEditorServices Wednesday, Steve Lee on DSC, Tyler Leonhardt with four vscode pushes, Sydney Smith opening PSResourceGet issues, and Anam Navied submitting four winget-pkgs contributions. Sean Wheeler spent Monday pushing four separate docs repos at once. 👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

• Jos Lieben pushed Collaborate and assortedFunctionsV2 in his first week on the roster. Collaborate is his self service B2B guest management portal for locked down Entra tenants, and assortedFunctionsV2 sits at 120 stars. 👉 https://github.com/jflieben/Collaborate

• Nathan McNulty worked azd-reference and azd-device-notifications midweek, closing issues and adding to the growing azd family. 👉 https://github.com/nathanmcnulty/azd-reference

• Maurice Daly cleared out ModernDriverManagement on Monday, closing five issues in one sitting plus a DriverAutomationTool push. 👉 https://github.com/maurice-daly/ModernDriverManagement

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Live dbatools AMA Webinar with the Core Team | Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT

An open Ask Me Anything with the people behind dbatools, the open source PowerShell toolkit for SQL Server administration, migration, and automation. Whether you already lean on dbatools every day or are still on the fence about getting started, this is the format where you get to put your specific questions in front of the people who wrote the answers. Speakers include Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret, Chrissy LeMaire, Andreas Jordan, and Cláudio Silva.
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT
Where: Online, see the link for details

👉 https://shorturl.at/N53tz

PowerShell 7.7 Preview 4 Adds Native Temporary Directory Support

Jake Shigetomi posted PowerShell 7.7.0-preview.4 on GitHub, introducing a dedicated New-TemporaryDirectory cmdlet contributed by community member Kirtikumar Anandrao Ramchandani. The preview also delivers practical daily driver fixes, resolving a tab completion regression for positional parameters and smoothing out output file path handling in Invoke-WebRequest.

👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/tag/v7.7.0-preview.4

Testing Microsoft Graph Without a Live Tenant

Morten Mynster joined Andrew Pla on the PowerShell Podcast to demo his new open source tooling around Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Graph. He walks through LeastPrivilegeEntra for right sizing overprivileged directory roles using diagnostic activity logs, then showcases MS Graph Proxy, an implementation built on Dev Proxy that lets engineers test scripts against dynamic, mocked Microsoft Graph data locally without touching a live cloud tenant.

Testing PowerShell 7.7 Preview 4 Side by Side

Harm Veenstra at PowerShell is Fun breaks down the PowerShell 7.7.0 preview 4 release, making the case for testing pre release builds early before new features hit general availability. Beyond highlighting community additions like New-TemporaryDirectory, he provides clean walkthroughs for installing the preview side by side on macOS using Homebrew and Windows using WinGet.

👉 https://powershellisfun.com/2026/09/02/powershell-v7-7-0-preview-4/

Bringing Dad Jokes to Your PowerShell Terminal

Harm Veenstra at PowerShell is fun showcases the FreeDadJokes module by Michael Free as a lighthearted way to break up busy workdays directly from the console. The setup simply queries a public joke API through Get-DadJoke, making it easy to drop the command into your terminal profile for a fresh groaner every time you launch a new shell session.

👉 https://powershellisfun.com/2026/08/28/the-freedadjokes-powershell-module/

Securing Microsoft 365 with Maester

Morten Mynster joined Andrew Pla and Tara on PDQ Live to break down how administrators can audit their Microsoft 365 environments using the open source Maester framework. He demos running simple baseline tests using Connect-Maester and Invoke-Maester, walking through the generated HTML security report that flags misconfigurations like hybrid accounts assigned Global Administrator permissions and links directly to remediation guidance.

Optimizing Get-Win32Process with Early Filtering

Jeff Hicks at Behind the PowerShell Pipeline revisits his CIM based Get-Win32Process function to demonstrate the performance gains of filtering early rather than down the pipeline with Where-Object. He walks through appending legacy WQL operators directly to CIM queries, including converting .NET datetime objects into DMTF strings so queries against timestamps like CreationDate actually work.

👉 https://buttondown.com/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/improving-get-win32process/

Mastering Non Interactive Microsoft Graph Authentication

Morten Mynster joined Andrew Pla on PDQ’s PowerShell Wednesday to walk through setting up unattended, non interactive authentication against Microsoft Graph. The pair contrast the ease and security risks of basic client secrets against production grade patterns like certificate based authentication and managed identities, demonstrating step by step connection flows in VS Code using Fred Weinmann’s Entra module.

Terminal Remote File Browsing and Editing Over WinRM

Arnaud Charles announced updates on LinkedIn for his open source companion tools, PSWEE and PSBITE, designed to manage remote Windows servers without opening full RDP sessions. The release tightens the workflow between the WinRM based file explorer and the VIM inspired buffer editor, adding a read only viewer in PSWEE, direct line jumps in PSBITE, and dedicated viewport scrollbars for large directories.

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7501539058272145409/

Instant Token Revocation for Risky Service Principals

Tony Redmond at Office 365 for IT Pros breaks down how Continuous Access Evaluation extends beyond user sessions to protect service principals and enterprise apps in Entra ID. He shows how to decode Graph SDK bearer tokens using jwt.io to verify the presence of CAE claims, then details using Confirm-MgRiskyServicePrincipalCompromised alongside Conditional Access policies to instantly kill active sessions on suspicious applications rather than waiting for tokens to expire.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/09/03/cae-service-principals/

Repo Roundup

• Doug Finke shipped psaisuite twice on Monday, v0.8.6 and v0.8.7 within hours of each other. That’s six point releases in three weeks on the AI provider abstraction. He’s building fast. 👉 https://github.com/dfinke/psaisuite/releases/tag/v0.8.7

• Fabien Tschanz cut Microsoft365DSC 1.26.902.1 on Wednesday after a heavy push day. Also spent time on PSDesiredStateConfiguration in the same session. Ship day. 👉 https://github.com/Microsoft365DSC/Microsoft365DSC/releases/tag/1.26.902.1

• Prateek Singh shipped cloudeval-action v1.2.11 on Monday, then spent Wednesday pushing cloudeval-cli, the AWS CloudFormation example, and the Azure ARM example. The whole cloudeval ecosystem got attention in one sitting. 👉 https://github.com/ganakailabs/cloudeval-action/releases/tag/v1.2.11

• David Sass forked Guerrilla into a new powershellsupport org on Wednesday. The Ghost-adjacent lateral movement prevention module now has a mirror under what looks like a fresh community org he’s setting up. Worth watching to see what powershellsupport becomes. 👉 https://github.com/powershellsupport/Guerrilla

• Sam Erde jumped into the original Locksmith on Monday with pushes and a comment on PR #277, plus a Maester push in the same session. That kind of cross-project contribution is exactly why this roster exists. 👉 https://github.com/jakehildreth/Locksmith

• Jake Hildreth turned his Wednesday attention to Stepper, three pushes and branch work. Stepper is his resumable step by step scripting module, an older project getting fresh love. He also had PwshSpectreConsole time over the weekend. 👉 https://github.com/jakehildreth/Stepper

• Michael Grafnetter forked TrustedSec’s Titanis on Wednesday, then Thursday opened issues against PowerShellGallery and reproducible-builds. The DSInternals author getting into supply chain reproducibility conversations is worth keeping an eye on. 👉 https://github.com/MichaelGrafnetter

• Marc-André Moreau spent Wednesday deep in the turso Rust fork and Windows Terminal with multiple pushes to each. The Devolutions crossover into upstream Microsoft repos continues at pace. 👉 https://github.com/awakecoding

• The Microsoft PowerShell team had a real Wednesday. Dongbo Wang on PowerShell with multiple pushes and branch cleanup, Patrick Meinecke also in PowerShell with PR #27950, Travis Plunk contributing, Sean Wheeler grinding PowerShell-Docs, and Steve Lee going hard on DSC PR #1701 with four separate comments. Same day, same repos. Something’s landing. 👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

• Nick Benton pushed AutopilotGroupTagger on Wednesday and Thursday, plus a CES2026-IntuneCD repo. A talk and tool combo brewing for a conference. 👉 https://github.com/ennnbeee/AutopilotGroupTagger

• Andreas Dieckmann rebooted his blog on Monday, multiple pushes and a deletion and rebuild pattern that usually means a new static site generator. 👉 https://github.com/diecknet/diecknet-blog

• Mark Orr surfaced Intune-MAA on Wednesday, first push after a week quiet since VM-Pilot v0.7.1. 👉 https://github.com/markorr321/Intune-MAA

• Jorge Suarez closed an IntuneHydrationKit PR and opened one on EndpointJobs Wednesday. Back to Intune tooling after the blog and Liftosaurus sprints. 👉 https://github.com/jorgeasaurus/EndpointJobs

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Live dbatools AMA Webinar with the Core Team | Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT

An open Ask Me Anything with the people behind dbatools, the open source PowerShell toolkit for SQL Server administration, migration, and automation. Whether you already lean on dbatools every day or are still on the fence about getting started, this is the format where you get to put your specific questions in front of the people who wrote the answers. Speakers include Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret, Chrissy LeMaire, Andreas Jordan, and Cláudio Silva.
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT
Where: Online, see the link for details

👉 https://shorturl.at/N53tz

Enforcing WAM for Interactive Microsoft Graph Sessions

Tony Redmond at Office 365 for IT Pros breaks down an upcoming service side change from Microsoft that requires delegated interactive sessions using the Microsoft Graph Command Line Tools application to use Web Account Manager for authentication. The shift renders browser based sign ins obsolete on older SDK releases, meaning administrators managing multiple accounts or juggling cross module assembly conflicts must switch to tenant registered applications or app only authentication to preserve their workflows.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/08/28/interactive-graph-sessions-wam/

Simplifying Microsoft Graph Delegated Authentication with Morten Mynster

Morten Mynster joined Andrew Pla on PDQ Live to demystify delegated authentication across Microsoft Graph and Entra ID using community tooling. He walked through streamlining token management with the Entra PowerShell module, handling refresh tokens to maintain long running automation sessions, and properly scoping user consent on custom app registrations.

Deploying Azure SRE Agent with PowerShell

Bart Pasmans at his personal blog breaks down how to deploy and control Microsoft new Azure SRE Agent directly through PowerShell using custom REST API wrapper functions. The walkthrough covers provisioning the agent with tailored action modes and access levels, along with essential lifecycle commands to shut down idle agents outside business hours and keep unit costs under control.

👉 https://bartpasmans.tech/azure-sre-agent/

Community Powered Directory for aka.ms Links Returns

Merill Fernando announced the return of akams.fyi, a community powered searchable directory of Microsoft aka.ms short links back after a year long hiatus. The refreshed platform features an updated interface designed to make browsing and contributing new shortcut entries significantly faster for engineers navigating the Microsoft ecosystem.

👉 akams.fyi

Building an OIDC Identity Server in PowerShell with Ben Reader

Ben Reader took the stage at PSConfEU to showcase a custom identity server written entirely in PowerShell to deconstruct how workload identity federation operates behind the scenes. He walked through managing RSA signing keys, publishing discovery endpoints, and bridging the local listener to Azure through a Cloudflare tunnel to authenticate workloads without passwords or certificates.

Scaling and Securing OpenClaw with Core Maintainers

Peter Steinberger and core maintainers joined GitHub to discuss the meteoric rise of OpenClaw from an initial messaging prototype into one of the fastest growing open source repositories.

Unit Testing Microsoft 365 Security with Maester and Mike Soule

Mike Soule joined Andrew Pla on the PowerShell Podcast to break down how to apply unit testing concepts to Microsoft 365 security using the open source test automation framework Maester. He shared how Sentinel Technologies leverages hundreds of built in community tests across Conditional Access, CIS baselines, and CISA standards to automate tenant validation, along with practical insights on EntraOps and the Enterprise Access Model.

Rebuilding Get-Process with CIM in PowerShell 7

Jeff Hicks at Behind the PowerShell Pipeline shares his approach to building a custom alternative to Get-Process using Get-CimInstance and the Win32_Process class to restore remote querying in PowerShell 7. The breakdown covers extracting process owners with the GetOwner method and automatically translating standard PowerShell wildcards into WQL syntax so users never have to think about database query conventions.

👉 https://buttondown.com/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/solving-the-cim-process-challenge/

GitHub Roundup

• The Microsoft PowerShell team had a real engineering week. Steve Lee on PowerShell/DSC, Dongbo Wang on both PowerShell/PowerShell and something called MCPServerPS, Patrick Meinecke (SeeminglyScience) on PowerShell, Travis Plunk on PowerShell, and Anam Navied on Microsoft.PowerShell.Archive.
  👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/DSC
  

• Justin Grote released MicrosoftMvp v0.0.5. A PowerShell module that hits the Microsoft MVP API, with OAuth2 browser auth. 👉 https://github.com/JustinGrote/MicrosoftMvp/releases/tag/v0.0.5
  

• Brad Wyatt made W365-CLI-Native public and pushed hard on Wednesday and Friday. A native CLI for Windows 365, plus separate windows-365 and Rest-Client repos moving in parallel. 👉 https://github.com/bwya77/W365-CLI-Native
  

• Christian Ritter surfaced MIAU, “Managed Identity Automation Utilities.” A PowerShell module that combines Azure Resource Graph, Azure RBAC, and Microsoft Graph application permissions for day-to-day managed identity work. 👉 https://github.com/HCRitter/MIAU
  

• Sam Erde renamed his ParkRanger repo (formerly Zero Email Domain) and started building it out. It’s a module that auto creates “reject all” SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for parked domains with no MX records. Cloudflare support first.
  👉 https://github.com/SamErde/ParkRanger
  

• Adam Driscoll pushed windbg-tool at Devolutions and opened a PR on powershell-universal-skills. The windbg tool is a Windows-first CLI for WinDbg workflows with TTD trace replay and dump triage. 👉 https://github.com/Devolutions/windbg-tool
  

• Nathan McNulty stayed in azd land with new work on azd-myworkid and azd-defender-reporting, plus closing a PR on azd-advanced-auditing. 👉 https://github.com/nathanmcnulty
  

• Nick Benton stood up oddsandendpoints-web and oddsandendpoints-scripts side by side. Site plus its script companion going up together usually means a launch is coming. 👉 https://github.com/ennnbeee/oddsandendpoints-web
  

• Chrissy LeMaire had another big dbatools Monday. Still brewing. 👉 https://github.com/dataplat/dbatools
  

• Aleksandar Nikolić stayed deep in zerotrustassessment PR reviews all week. 👉 https://github.com/microsoft/zerotrustassessment
  

• Doug Finke pushed PSPandas on Wednesday.
  👉 https://github.com/dfinke/PSPandas
  

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Live dbatools AMA Webinar with the Core Team | Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT

An open Ask Me Anything with the people behind dbatools, the open source PowerShell toolkit for SQL Server administration, migration, and automation. Whether you already lean on dbatools every day or are still on the fence about getting started, this is the format where you get to put your specific questions in front of the people who wrote the answers. Speakers include Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret, Chrissy LeMaire, Andreas Jordan, and Cláudio Silva.
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT
Where: Online, see the link for details

👉 https://shorturl.at/N53tz

The discussion walks through accelerated release cadences, DSC version 3.4 planning, community stewardship initiatives for abandoned modules, and documentation updates detailing version 7 UUID support in PowerShell 7.7. Live demos showcase relocatable user scoped module paths using Get-PSContentPath, machine wide configuration fixes for MSIX installations in ProgramData, and dramatic concurrency speed improvements when resolving dependencies in PSResourceGet. The call wraps with a critical security alert regarding recent typosquatting attempts discovered across PowerShell Gallery and advice on how engineers can avoid malicious packages.

👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell-RFC/blob/master/CommunityCall/notes/20260820_ChatTranscript.md

Query CVE Information Using the PoshCVE Module

Harm Veenstra, Microsoft MVP and author of the PowerShellisFun.com blog, walks through the PoshCVE module by Dan Hough, a tool designed to streamline searching and reporting on public security flaws directly from the console.

👉 https://powershellisfun.com/2026/08/20/query-cve-information-using-the-powershell-poshcve-module/

What PowerShell Taught TJ Turner About IT

Andrew Pla recently joined the PowerShell Podcast at Microsoft’s TechMentor conference in Redmond, Washington, to sit down with TJ Turner for a wide ranging discussion on career growth and systems administration. The episode traces TJ’s professional journey from early infrastructure work through the education, finance, and retail sectors to his current role as a Cloud Evangelist at TD SYNNEX. Along the way, the conversation explores the human side of technology and the critical lessons that never appear in standard product documentation.

Building Help Documents with Microsoft.PowerShell.Platyps

Jeffery Hicks recently published a guide in Behind the PowerShell Pipeline exploring how to build new module documentation using the modern Microsoft.PowerShell.Platyps module. The post walks through establishing a dedicated documentation folder structure and generating initial Markdown help files with New-MarkdownCommandHelp while sharing a script to elegantly handle path resolution quirks. Jeffery details how engineers can leverage inline updating with New-CommandHelp to dynamically inject custom notes, format code examples, and append alias information before converting the updated command help objects into standard Markdown files ready for online publishing.

👉 https://buttondown.com/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/module-documentation-with/

Ten Years of the PowerShell Curl Alias

Daniel Stenberg, creator of curl, reflected on LinkedIn about the decade-long persistence of the PowerShell aliases mapping curl and wget to Invoke-WebRequest. He revisits his 2016 pull request to remove the shortcuts shortly after PowerShell went open source on GitHub, a PR that maintainers closed within 34 minutes, citing backward compatibility for existing scripts. The aliases were later dropped from PowerShell Core 6.0, and Windows has shipped a real curl.exe since 2018. But Windows PowerShell 5.1 remains the default powershell.exe on every Windows machine, so developers are still tripping over the shadowed commands ten years later. Quick fixes: call curl.exe explicitly, remove the alias in your profile, or switch to PowerShell 7.

👉 View Daniel Stenberg’s LinkedIn Post

How We Enabled PSReadLine for Screen Reader Accessibility

Andy Jordan presented at PowerShell Conference Europe to detail the engineering journey of fixing screen reader accessibility within the PSReadLine module. The session walks through the historical challenge where PSReadLine would invisibly rerender entire terminal buffers while typing, resulting in a broken audio loop for engineers relying on tools like NVDA or Narrator. Andy explained how a feature request from the Visual Studio Code team prompted a renewed focus on the issue, leading the group to discard a messy control character prototype in favor of a clean common prefix diff algorithm that only writes new buffer changes to the screen. The presentation wraps up by highlighting how direct requirements from partner product teams and a willingness to prototype can effectively push long standing accessibility bugs to resolution.

What to Expect at PowerShell Summit 2027

The Sessionize Call for Papers outlines the upcoming PowerShell Summit 2027 scheduled for April 5 to 8, 2027, at the Lake Buena Vista Sheraton Hotel in Orlando, Florida. The event brings together technologists and automators for four days of deep technical content, hands on labs, and community collaboration spanning automation, cloud computing, and security topics. The submission window runs through August 31, 2026, welcoming diverse session formats ranging from 25 minute fast focus talks to four hour interactive labs.

👉 https://sessionize.com/pshsummit27

Hybrid Identity Protection Conference 2026

Semperis announced the upcoming Hybrid Identity Protection Conference scheduled for September 8 to 10, 2026, at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Nashville Downtown in Nashville, Tennessee. The event brings together identity security practitioners and Active Directory experts for three days of practical insights, crisis management strategies, and real world discussions on defending hybrid infrastructure. The program features dedicated tracks covering CISO leadership, identity masterclasses, and emerging AI defense challenges to help organizations prepare for complex threat landscapes.

👉 Hybrid Identity Protection Conference 2026

Github Roundup

Nathan McNulty shipped azd-risk-based-ca v1.0.0 this morning. He’d been building toward it all week, pushing on azd-emergency-access, azd-maester, azd-entra-health-monitoring, and research-passkeys, and the azd- prefix everywhere is the tell. He’s building out a family of Azure Developer CLI templates for Entra security patterns, and a v1.0.0 is a real “this is done enough to use” moment. 👉 https://github.com/nathanmcnulty/azd-risk-based-ca/releases/tag/v1.0.0

• Fabien Tschanz cut Microsoft365DSC 1.26.819.1 on Wednesday after a marathon push day. If anyone in your world does Microsoft 365 desired state work, that’s the update to grab. 👉 https://github.com/Microsoft365DSC/Microsoft365DSC/releases/tag/1.26.819.1

• Doug Finke released psaisuite v0.8.5 on Tuesday. That’s four psaisuite point releases in two weeks, and the AI provider abstraction module is clearly his current center of gravity, not PSPandas. 👉 https://github.com/dfinke/psaisuite/releases/tag/v0.8.5

• Mark Orr released VM-Pilot v0.7.1 Monday with a follow up push Tuesday. 👉 https://github.com/markorr321/VM-Pilot/releases/tag/v0.7.1

• Simon Wåhlin released PSBicep v3.0.2. 👉 https://github.com/PSBicep/PSBicep/releases/tag/v3.0.2

• Jorge Suarez released WinGet-Manifest-Fetcher v1.6.0 on Saturday. 👉 https://github.com/jorgeasaurus/WinGet-Manifest-Fetcher/releases/tag/v1.6.0

Away from the release notes:

• Chrissy LeMaire had a giant dbatools Tuesday with five pushes in the span of a few hours on 8/20. Something’s brewing. 👉 https://github.com/dataplat/dbatools

• Steve Lee, Sean Wheeler, and Emanuel Palm all had heads down Wednesday work days, Steve on PowerShell/DSC, Sean grinding PowerShell-Docs with real substantive PRs, Emanuel deep in AzBobbyTables. Three Microsoft and adjacent folks with actual engineering days on the same date is worth watching for a coordinated announcement. 👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/DSC

• Justin Grote forked something interesting called TaskCmdlet from jborean93/PwshAsync. Async and Task based PowerShell cmdlets from Justin is worth a bookmark. 👉 https://github.com/JustinGrote/TaskCmdlet

• Michał Machniak had another big DSC v3 weekend on ADSGroupPolicyDSCv3 and then went quiet mid week, which is his consistent pattern. He sprints on weekends. 👉 https://github.com/mimachniak/ADSGroupPolicyDSCv3

• Sam Erde was in his VS Code extension pack on 8/17. 👉 https://github.com/SamErde/PSPreworkout-VSCode-Extension-Pack

• Tony Redmond did his usual Office365itpros push streak on 8/15 and 8/16. He commits like he blogs, constant. 👉 https://github.com/12Knocksinna/Office365itpros

• David Sass is still hammering the ATS scanner and started contributing to killed-by-microsoft, the graveyard site of deprecated Microsoft products. Delightful side quest. 👉 https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Live dbatools AMA Webinar with the Core Team | Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT

An open Ask Me Anything with the people behind dbatools, the open source PowerShell toolkit for SQL Server administration, migration, and automation. Whether you already lean on dbatools every day or are still on the fence about getting started, this is the format where you get to put your specific questions in front of the people who wrote the answers. Speakers include Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret, Chrissy LeMaire, Andreas Jordan, and Cláudio Silva.
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT
Where: Online, see the link for details

👉 https://shorturl.at/N53tz

J. Shigetomi published the version 7.6.5 release of PowerShell on the official GitHub repository to deliver a targeted servicing update for the engine. The patch resolves a specific dot sourcing behavior issue encountered when executing advanced function scripts using the pwsh -file command. The release also ships with several build and packaging improvements including an update to the .NET SDK 10.0.302 along with targeted fixes for deployment pipelines and minimum package sizes for arm64 architectures.

👉 v7.6.5 Release of PowerShell

Microsoft AI Unveils MAI Thinking 1

Microsoft AI introduced MAI Thinking 1 as a new medium sized reasoning model designed to handle intensive enterprise workflows and complex problem solving. The sparse mixture of experts model features 35 billion active parameters within a one trillion total parameter architecture and includes a 256k token context window. Microsoft highlights that the model achieves competitive scores on software engineering benchmarks and advanced mathematical evaluations while utilizing clean and traceable training data.

👉https://microsoft.ai/news/introducing-mai-thinking-1/

I Finally Built the Impossible Windows App

Chris Titus in his latest YouTube video shared the release of a completely rewritten, native .NET version of his popular Windows Utility while maintaining full compatibility with open source WinUtil configurations. Instead of executing PowerShell behind the scenes to apply tweaks, the new application translates those configurations directly into native .NET implementations to deliver faster execution, automated updates, system detection, and an integrated Windows 11 ISO creator.

Why Active Directory Alone Is No Longer Enough

Jorge Lopez on the Microsoft Entra Blog outlined five core signs that organizations have outgrown legacy on premises Active Directory in favor of modern cloud identity platforms. The discussion highlights the shifting realities of modern business infrastructure where cloud applications, diverse workforces, and AI agents demand flexible security models that extend beyond traditional network perimeters.

👉 Why Active Directory alone is no longer enough

PowerShell Scripting Hidden Secrets at PSConf EU

Jeff Hicks recently presented at the PowerShell Conference Europe to share a collection of less commonly used scripting techniques and console shortcuts designed to improve administrative efficiency. The session walks through practical command line workflows and advanced features that many engineers overlook during daily automation tasks. Jeffery balanced the presentation by covering both interactive console tips and deeper scripting capabilities to help practitioners get more out of their tooling.

Updating Help with the Modern Platyps Module

Jeff Hicks in Behind the PowerShell Pipeline continues his deep dive into the rewritten Microsoft.PowerShell.Platyps module designed for modern help documentation. The guide focuses on maintaining documentation for an updated stand alone function, demonstrating how the Update-MarkdownCommandHelp cmdlet syncs parameter and output changes directly into markdown. Jeff walks through automatic backup file creation, previewing help, exporting to MAML format, and highlights where the new tooling still struggles to detect defined command aliases.

👉 More Platyps Production

RBAC for PowerShell and IT Operations

ScriptRunner recently shared a video focused on role based access control for PowerShell and IT operations to help organizations manage permissions and secure automation workflows. This is more of a product promo-ish short one, but I thought it would be worth sharing :)

Microsoft.PowerShell.Archive Version 1.2.6 Rolls Out

MVP Andres Bohren at the Icewolf blog highlights the recent release of the Microsoft.PowerShell.Archive module version 1.2.6 from the PowerShell Team.

👉 https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/08/08/Microsoft-PowerShell-Archive-1-2-6-released/

PowerShell Framework Collective with Fred Weinmann

Fred Weinmann recently joined the PowerShell Podcast to walk through the PowerShell Framework Collective and share his personal approach to building the tools that build automation scripts. The discussion centers on investing in robust scaffolding around code to make automation faster, cleaner, and more consistent across enterprise environments. Fred breaks down four core architectural wins from his framework stack, highlighting friendly error handling and structured development practices.

Expanding Purview DLP and Information Protection to Foreign Platforms

Tony Redmond on Office 365 for IT Pros examined the recent Microsoft Purview update expanding data loss prevention and information protection auto labeling to external platforms like Google Workspace and Box. The rollout relies on Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps connectors to process external files, requiring careful coordination with tenant administrators and security teams.

👉 Control External Services Data with Purview

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Live dbatools AMA Webinar with the Core Team | Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT

An open Ask Me Anything with the people behind dbatools, the open source PowerShell toolkit for SQL Server administration, migration, and automation. Whether you already lean on dbatools every day or are still on the fence about getting started, this is the format where you get to put your specific questions in front of the people who wrote the answers. Speakers include Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret, Chrissy LeMaire, Andreas Jordan, and Cláudio Silva.
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT
Where: Online, see the link for details

👉 https://shorturl.at/N53tz

Yesterday, I released a new video on my PowerShell Engineer channel introducing the PowerShell Engineer Standard and a specialized small language model named PSEng that makes amazing PowerShell directly on your computer for just the cost of your own electricity.

Watch the video, and check out my post:

.

Transfer Meeting Ownership with Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer

Tony Redmond over at Office 365 for IT Pros breaks down the new Invoke-ChangeMeetingOrganizer Exchange Online PowerShell cmdlet designed to solve the headache of transferring meetings when employees leave a company. The guide explains how administrators can use the tool to switch organizers and push calendar updates to attendees automatically while stressing that reliable transfers require using Microsoft Graph to retrieve specific event identifiers. Tony ultimately highlights a major oversight with the current release by warning that the cmdlet fails to update the underlying Teams join data and forces new organizers to manually generate a replacement online meeting space.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/08/06/invoke-changemeetingorganizer/

Securing Active Directory from the Ground Up

Evgenij Smirnov recently joined Andrew Pla on the PowerShell Podcast to discuss his thirty years of experience in Active Directory and security consulting. The conversation explores common escalation paths attackers use to compromise organizations and digs into what actually gets real world AD environments popped. Evgenij highlights critical vulnerabilities like over permissioned accounts and exposed certificate authorities while explaining how to engineer systems so security is never an afterthought. He also warns listeners about the severe risks of keeping unencrypted domain controller backups and shares practical advice for locking down infrastructure before an incident occurs.

Microsoft.Graph PowerShell Modules 2.39.0 Released

Andres Bohren has the practical rundown on the Microsoft.Graph and Microsoft.Graph.Beta 2.39.0 modules that Microsoft dropped in the PowerShell Gallery. Release notes were not published at the time of writing, which is annoying but not unusual, so Andres does what Andres does and gives you the exact PSResourceGet commands to check installed versions, uninstall the old set cleanly, and pull the new modules from the gallery. He also includes the reminder most people forget until Azure Automation starts complaining, which is that you also need to push the update to your Azure Automation runtime environments if you are running scripts that authenticate against Graph on a schedule. Short, direct, and ready to paste into your terminal.

👉 https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/08/04/microsoft-graph-powershell-modules-2-39-0-released/

Test Your Console Muscle Memory with PwshTyper

Harm Veenstra over at the PowerShell is fun blog showcases a unique way to test your console muscle memory using Shaun Lawrie’s PwshTyper module. The tool requires PowerShell 7.4 or higher and leverages PwshSpectreConsole to bring a fully featured typing speed tester directly into the terminal window. Users can launch the test using the Invoke-PwshTyper cmdlet and choose between standard word categories like commandlets or jump into specialized finger isolation modes to really challenge their daily typing habits.

👉 https://powershellisfun.com/2026/08/05/powershell-typing-speed-tester/

Locksmith 2 Gains Richer Formatting and Triage Options

Jake Hildreth recently updated the open source Locksmith 2 Active Directory Certificate Services toolkit with a suite of presentation enhancements across multiple pull requests, alongside a community contribution from Mason Moser. The changes focus heavily on output structure rather than new detections, introducing default formatting views for findings and a detailed per technique system like ESC8Detailed. Additionally, results are now severity sorted with custom banners and risk metrics to transform raw terminal dumps into prioritized security reports.

👉 https://github.com/jakehildreth/Locksmith2

Tagging PowerShell Functions with the AST

Jeff Hicks at Behind the PowerShell Pipeline shares a new approach to tagging PowerShell functions using the Abstract Syntax Tree. Moving away from alternate data streams that risk data loss across storage drives, this method parses code tokens directly from a loaded script block to extract custom metadata. The walkthrough demonstrates how to initialize token variables and run the ParseInput method to target specific comment labels like #cmdTags inside a function definition. It concludes by showing how these extracted tags were integrated into the PSScriptTools module to create custom views and filter commands by category.

👉 https://buttondown.com/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/another-script-tagging-technique/

Entra News #160 with Merill and Joshua Fernando

Merill and Joshua’s August 2 edition is dense with SMS and voice retirement news and a lot of quieter architectural work worth catching. Highlights include the new device sync capability for Entra Cloud Sync in public preview, the beta Graph procedure for opting out of the SMS to passkey automatic migration where you set optOutSettings.passkeyDynamicMigration to true for a September through February exclusion, guidance on hardening GitHub and GitLab federated credentials by moving off mutable subject identifiers, and a fresh tenant estate architecture series with seven new articles covering primary tenants, isolated critical system tenants, business partner isolation, and hybrid identity. The Maester 2.2 release is also flagged, along with a batch of PoShaKucha talks from PSConf EU 2026 that are worth your time.

Entra.News - Your weekly dose of Microsoft Entra

Entra 🆔 News #160 → This week in Microsoft Entra

👋 Hi, Merill and Joshua here with this week’s roundup of the latest news on Microsoft Entra from around the globe 🌍…

Read more

2 months ago · 62 likes · Joshua Fernando and Merill Fernando

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Live dbatools AMA Webinar with the Core Team | Wednesday, October 7 at 12:00 pm GMT

An open Ask Me Anything with the people behind dbatools, the open source PowerShell toolkit for SQL Server administration, migration, and automation. Whether you already lean on dbatools every day or are still on the fence about getting started, this is the format where you get to put your specific questions in front of the people who wrote the answers. Speakers include Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret, Chrissy LeMaire, Andreas Jordan, and Cláudio Silva.
When:
Where: Online, see the link for details

👉 https://shorturl.at/N53tz

Ask any AI assistant for a script that disables stale Active Directory accounts. You’ll get something that looks right. Comment-based help, a param() block, maybe even a -WhatIf. It reads like code a competent engineer wrote.

Then you run it, and it dies on Get-ADUser -IncludeDisabled, because there is no such parameter and there never was.

That’s the defect that matters, and it isn’t a style problem. Ugly code announces itself. An invented parameter reads perfectly, survives review, and fails at 2am in front of the person who inherited your script. It’s worse than bad code because nothing about it looks wrong.

I’ve been collecting these for a while. New-ScheduledTaskTrigger -StartBoundary, -StartDate, -Monthly: an entire coherent family of parameters that do not exist, invented by a model that had clearly absorbed the shape of what scheduled-task parameters look like. Add-DnsServerRecursionScope -Forwarders, where the real parameter is -Forwarder, singular. Get-GPO -Identity, twelve times, where the real ones are -Name, -Guid, and -All.

Check out the video demo of some of these tools here:

The drive back from the Ozarks

The idea showed up on a highway last month.

We were driving back from the Ozarks, my wife and daughter and son in the car, crossing rural Missouri and then rural Illinois on the way to Springfield. There’s a long stretch of that drive where there’s nothing to do but think, and what I kept turning over was the list. Not a list of things AI gets wrong, exactly. A list of things I’d want in writing before I let any assistant, or any junior engineer, hand me a script I was going to run against production. Like, a PowerShell list that’s similar to what I do with my TeacherMagic tool.

Not style preferences. The non-negotiables. The things that, if they’re missing, I don’t care how clean the formatting is.

By the time we hit the hotel I had most of it in my head. My wife and daughter went down to the pool. I sat in the room with my son while he played Fortnite, opened the laptop, and wrote the first version of what became AGENTS.md. Then, because a standard nobody applies is just a blog post, I built the first working demo of the Chrome extension in the same sitting.

That was the whole origin. A drive, a hotel room, and a kid with a headset on.

The research says it’s not just me

A study by Zhang et al. (arXiv:2601.06419) found that more than 60% of PowerShell generated by GPT-4o and o3-mini is insecure without structured guidance, and that two thirds of GPT-4o’s PowerShell violates a PSScriptAnalyzer rule.

The number I keep coming back to is this one: GPT-4o scores 3% at noticing when a function that changes system state is missing ShouldProcess.

Models are reasonable judges of what’s present. They’re close to blind about what’s absent. A linter can only find what’s there. Something else has to say what should have been.

The non-negotiables

The PowerShell Engineer Standard is a single markdown file. Twenty-one sections, about 1,100 lines: naming, parameters and validation, splatting, pipeline output, error handling, ShouldProcess, help quality, Pester v5, module structure, performance, security, cross-platform, classes, accessibility, localization, style, GUIs, prose voice, and file formats.

Section 0 is the part I wrote first, on the drive. Thirteen items. Every function has to satisfy all of them, and if it can’t, the model is supposed to stop and say so rather than ship something that looks finished.

Here they are, one at a time. Each of these gets its own deep dive later, as will every other section of the Standard. This is the tour, not the manual.

Advanced function: [CmdletBinding()] plus a param() block. Without it you don’t get -Verbose, -ErrorAction, or any of the other common parameters — and without SupportsShouldProcess on top of it, no -WhatIf. A script that skips this isn’t a command, it’s a text file that runs.

Approved verb, singular noun, prefix applied in module context. Get-Verb is the whole list. Singular nouns because Get-PSEUsers implies it can’t return one. The prefix is what keeps your Get-Config from colliding with everyone else’s.

[OutputType()] declared. It costs one line and it’s the cheapest way to tell tooling, and the next reader, what comes out without executing anything.

Emits objects, never formatted strings. A [pscustomobject] or a class. The moment a function returns pretty text, it stops being composable and the next person has to parse your output back into data.

Validation expressed as parameter attributes, not if blocks. [ValidateSet] gets you tab completion and accepted values in Get-Help for free; [ValidateRange] and [ValidateScript] at least put the constraint somewhere discoverable. Bury it in an if and nobody finds it until it throws.

Comment-based help with a runnable .EXAMPLE. Runnable meaning copy, paste, press enter, no edits. If the example needs fixing before it works, it’s decoration.

SupportsShouldProcess on anything that changes state. This is the one models are worst at, because supplying it means noticing that something required is absent rather than that something present is wrong. Declare it, gate the mutation only, and -WhatIf becomes an audit of the run instead of a promise you made in the help text.

Terminating errors are catchable, non-terminating errors don’t masquerade as success. If you have to catch it, pass -ErrorAction Stop on that call. catch { } with nothing in it is a defect, not a style choice.

No secret reaches an output stream, a native-command argument, or source control. Module logging records bound parameter values and transcription captures the verbose stream, so Write-Verbose "pass: $plain" writes the password to the log on every endpoint that runs it. Native command arguments are visible in the process table — to any local user on Linux and macOS, and to anyone with sufficient rights to query Win32_Process on Windows.

PSScriptAnalyzer clean against the project settings file. Not “clean-ish.” Not “warnings suppressed.” Clean, or suppressed with an inline comment saying why.

Comments and help written in the voice of section 19, not in marketing register. No “leverage.” No “robust.” No “In today’s fast-paced world.” Prose ships with the module and it’s where generated work gives itself away fastest.

No invented cmdlets, parameters, modules, or properties. Section 0.1, and the reason the whole document exists. More on this in a second.

Full cmdlet names and named parameters. No aliases, no positional arguments. Where-Object, not ?. You wrote it once and someone will read it fifty times at three in the morning.

Section 0.1 does the real work

The one that earns its place is Do not invent API surface.

It doesn’t ask a model to guess better. Guessing better isn’t a thing you can instruct. It asks the model to say when it’s unsure, in the code, where you’ll actually see it:

# VERIFY: confirm -IncludeDisabled exists in your module version
Get-Command Get-ADUser -Syntax
(Get-Command Get-ADUser).Parameters.Keys

The same rule covers .NET surface, which gets invented just as often and checked far less. A constructor overload that was never there, a static method that sounds right, an enum value that fits the pattern. All of it reads fine and throws on the first run.

Stating uncertainty costs you five seconds. An invented parameter costs you a debugging session, and costs the model your trust in everything else in the file.

None of this is a new opinion, and the Lineage section says so outright. Roughly a third of the document is already mechanically enforced by rules shipping in PSScriptAnalyzer. Most of sections 2 through 7 come from Microsoft’s own cmdlet development guidelines. PoshCode’s Practice and Style guide got there first on formatting. The parts that are genuinely new, security and accessibility and localization and writing for generation rather than for reading, are named explicitly, with a note that this is where to aim criticism.

The whole thing is MIT. Take it, fork it, bend it to your house rules.

Start here: drop AGENTS.md in the repo

If you take one thing from this article, take this one, because it’s free and it’s permanent.

AGENTS.md is the emerging convention for repo-level agent instructions, and it’s the delivery channel with the least friction by a wide margin. You put the file in the root of your repository. That’s the install.

From then on, most agents that read repository context pick it up: Codex, Cursor, Copilot’s agent mode, and a growing list of others. There’s no extension to install, no API key, no per-request token cost you’re paying out of pocket, and nothing for your teammates to configure. They clone the repo and the standard comes with it.

Claude Code is the exception worth knowing about. It reads CLAUDE.md and ignores AGENTS.md entirely. No warning, no error. It just runs with no project instructions and you wonder why the output got worse. Don’t rename the file, or you’ve solved it for Claude Code and broken it for everything else. Add a CLAUDE.md alongside it that pulls the real file in: @AGENTS.md on a single line, or ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md if your team is fine with symlinks in git. One source of truth, two filenames.

That last part is the reason I’d start here even if you plan to use everything else. A standard that lives in one engineer’s browser extension is that engineer’s preference. A standard that lives in the repo is the project’s, and every agent that touches the project is conformant by default.

The /adopt command writes the whole set for you: AGENTS.md, the CLAUDE.md shim, Copilot instructions, Cursor rules, PSScriptAnalyzerSettings.psd1, and a CI workflow. Or you can copy the one file by hand and be done in ten seconds.

The Chrome extension

This was the second thing built in that hotel room.

It’s a side panel that sits next to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot in the browser. You describe what you want. It builds the prompt, carrying the relevant slices of the Standard, and hands it to whichever assistant you’re already paying for. No new subscription, no API key, no data going anywhere except to the assistant you chose.

Download the Extension Now

The word “relevant” is doing work in that paragraph, and it’s a correction I had to make early. You should almost never inject the whole Standard. Twelve thousand tokens of rules for a request that needed four of them is waste, and worse, it buries the sections that mattered under the ones that didn’t. So the assembler picks a baseline plus whatever the task and your workspace imply. Mention a PowerShell 5.1 target and the cross-platform section comes along quietly, because that’s where the ternary operator and ForEach-Object -Parallel warnings live.

The Firefox version is published and works the same way. The Edge version is built and sitting in review, which is its own kind of character-building experience.

The custom GPT, back from the dead

I built a custom GPT years ago, back when custom GPTs were the new thing. It was trained on my book, PowerShell for Systems Engineers, and it was reasonably good at what the book covered.

Then I stopped touching it, the way you do.

It’s now been rebuilt on the PowerShell Engineer Standard. Same place, same link, entirely different behavior. It still has the book’s material underneath, which turns out to matter, because the book explains why the practices exist and the Standard only tells you what they are. The combination answers better than either does alone.

If you already live in ChatGPT and don’t want another extension, this is your path in.

VS Code, and Open VSX

The VS Code extension is where the loop actually closes, and it’s the one I’d point a working engineer at after AGENTS.md.

It’s published on both the Visual Studio Marketplace and Open VSX, so it works in VS Code, VSCodium, Cursor, Windsurf, and anything else building on the open registry.

Two ways to use it. The first is @pse in Copilot Chat, which is the conversational path: ask, get an answer built against the Standard. The second is the one that matters more. The extension registers its tools globally, so Copilot’s agent mode can call them on its own, without you remembering to ask. The agent decides it’s writing PowerShell, reaches for the Standard, and applies it.

The advantage this has over the browser extension is context it can actually read. It sees your module manifest. It sees the function names that already exist in your project. So it knows your prefix without being told, it knows which of your own commands it can call, and it stops inventing a helper function you never wrote.

The PSScriptAnalyzer piece, and what it doesn’t mean

The extension runs PSScriptAnalyzer against the Standard’s settings file, inline, as you work. That part’s straightforward.

What I keep having to say out loud is what happens when it comes back clean.

No rule fired. That is a floor, not proof of correctness.

That exact framing is in the VS Code output, in the MCP server’s response, in the GitHub Action’s job summary, and, deliberately, in the tool description that Copilot’s agent mode reads before it decides how much to trust the result. If a tool doesn’t tell a model what its output doesn’t mean, the model will happily overclaim on its behalf. A clean analyzer run says no rule matched. It says nothing at all about whether Get-ADUser -IncludeDisabled exists.

There’s a matching rule about execution, and it lives in a separate file so the distinction can’t erode by accident. Static analysis parses without running anything, so it runs automatically. Pester executes the code under test, so it never runs unless you say yes, per invocation, every time.

PSEng, built on Phi

If the Standard costs twelve thousand tokens to carry in context, the obvious question is whether a model can just learn it instead.

Why Phi

Phi is Microsoft Research’s family of small language models, and the thesis behind it is the reason it’s the right base for this.

The original Phi paper was titled Textbooks Are All You Need. The argument was that data quality beats data quantity by a wider margin than anyone expected, and that a small model trained on carefully curated, textbook-grade material can hold its own against models many times its size. Phi-4 is the 14-billion-parameter result of running that thesis for several generations, and Microsoft released it under the MIT license, weights and all.

Which means: a Microsoft-built small model, trained on the premise that a good textbook beats a big pile of scraped text, released under a license that lets you fine-tune it, and pointed at a standard for writing Microsoft’s own shell language. Small enough to train on hardware you already own. Every piece of that lined up.

What comes out the other side

The first version was trained on a different open-weight base, before Phi. The method is the same either way. The training set is PowerShell that scores 100/100 against a frozen rubric, generated and scored entirely on a laptop, with no hosted API anywhere in the pipeline.

The useful way to describe the result isn’t a score. It’s what changes in the code.

Ask a general purpose assistant for an account-cleanup function and you tend to get output with a specific set of holes. It reports progress with Write-Host, so nothing it tells you can be captured, piped, or exported. You get a screen of green text and no audit trail. It calls the mutating cmdlet without -ErrorAction Stop inside its try, so a non-terminating failure sails past the catch and it prints a success message for an account it didn’t actually disable. It catches errors generically, flattens them to a string, and throws away the error record. It emits nothing at all, so you can’t pipe the results into Export-Csv to hand your auditor.

Every one of those is something I’ve watched a frontier model do this month.

The tuned model produces the other shape by default: SupportsShouldProcess with ConfirmImpact set, a typed catch on the specific exception the AD module actually throws, Get-ADUser splatted rather than run off the edge of the screen, and one [pscustomobject] per account evaluated rather than per account changed, so a -WhatIf run is a report you can file.

That last detail is the one I’d point at. Nobody asked for it. It’s an engineering judgment about what the person running this at 2am will need afterwards, and it’s in the Standard because that’s the kind of thing a standard is for.

What it does not fix is the invented parameter. That’s still where nearly all of its remaining errors live, and it’s the honest limit of this approach. Fine-tuning is good at teaching behaviour and bad at storing facts. A model trained on Get-Help dumps absorbs the general shape of parameter names and produces fluent, plausible, wrong code. So the surface information is used as a filter instead. Every candidate is checked against real installed modules before it can enter the training set, and anything invented is thrown out rather than learned.

Conformance is solved. Hallucination isn’t, and I’d rather say that than let you find out yourself.

The part your security team cares about

Here’s where a local model stops being a technical curiosity.

Look at what’s actually in the script you’d paste into a chat window. Server names. OU distinguished names. Service account names. Your naming conventions, your network topology, which security groups gate what. A stale-account cleanup script is a small map of how your directory is organised, and the error message you paste back to ask “why doesn’t this work?” is usually more revealing than the script was.

That’s not a hypothetical objection. It’s the reason the answer is no.

PSEng runs on the machine in front of you. Not “encrypted in transit.” Not “we don’t train on your data.” Nothing is transmitted, because there is nothing to transmit. No API key, no account, no network call, no vendor.

What that buys, concretely:

• It works air-gapped. Isolated networks, classified environments, OT and manufacturing segments, anywhere with no route to the internet by design. Most AI tooling can’t be deployed there at all. This can.

• Procurement has nothing to review. No data-processing agreement, no sub-processor list, no retention policy, no data-residency question. The review that normally takes a quarter doesn’t apply to software that never phones home.

• It doesn’t have outages. When a provider goes down, and they do, your scripting assistant is still sitting on your laptop.

• The cost doesn’t scale with use. No per-token billing, no seat count, no awkward invoice conversation when the team starts using it properly.

There’s a second, quieter benefit that only shows up once you’re using it. A model that knows the Standard doesn’t need to be told the Standard, which means the entire context window is available for your code. Twelve thousand tokens of rules is most of a small model’s working memory. Hand the prompted version a 500 line script to refactor and it doesn’t fit. Hand it to this one and it does.

The trade is real and worth stating plainly. A small local model is not as generally capable as a frontier model. It writes PowerShell to a standard. It won’t help you with your Terraform.

But for the specific job of “write me a function that follows our rules and doesn’t invent cmdlets,” the gap is much narrower than you’d expect. And in a regulated environment, the model you’re actually allowed to use beats the one you aren’t.

Get it

The preview is up on Hugging Face: huggingface.co/jimtyler/pseng-14b-preview

It’s a LoRA adapter, about 213 MB, MIT licensed. The model card has the exact commands, including the one that builds the quantized Phi-4 base it expects.

It runs on Apple Silicon only. The training and the runtime both use MLX, Apple’s array framework, so a Mac with an M-series chip is the requirement. I am working on one good enough for Windows, but I am working with the hardware I have, and it’s worth being blunt about rather than letting you find out after the download. The reason is prosaic: MLX is what made training a 14 billion parameter model on a laptop practical in the first place, and the laptop I had was a Mac. A GGUF build would open this up to Windows through Ollama or LM Studio, and it’s on the list.

Call it what it is: a preview. It was trained on 517 examples, stopped early on a noisy validation curve, and it has not yet been scored against the frozen benchmark. It still invents a parameter now and then, which is the whole reason section 0.1 exists and the reason you check anything you don’t recognize before you run it. I’ve got work to do!

What’s on the horizon

Several of these are built and queued rather than theoretical, and I’ve kept them out of this article mostly for space.

An MCP server, so any MCP-speaking client carries the Standard without an extension. A GitHub Copilot extension and an M365 Copilot agent, each shaped for the context its host expects. A Claude Skill. A GitHub Action at the other end of the loop, running PSScriptAnalyzer against the Standard’s settings and annotating your pull requests. Actually, a lot of these things are done and maybe not published.

One rule holds all of it together, and it’s the reason adding channels doesn’t multiply the maintenance: a single core/ package owns the assembler, the Standard payload, the file templates, and the verification engine. Every channel derives from it, and the test suite fails if any of them drift.

Then there are the deep dives. Every section of the Standard gets its own article, starting with the thirteen non-negotiables above, because a checklist tells you what and I’d rather you knew why.

And in the meantime, if you hit a cmdlet or a parameter you don’t recognize in generated code, whoever generated it, check it before you run it. That habit is worth more than every tool on this list. Let’s go, fellow PowerShell Engineers!

The PowerShell Engineer Standard is MIT-licensed and lives at powershellengineer.com/standard. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft. PowerShell is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

Merill Fernando opened a request for comments on the Maester GitHub repository proposing a major architectural shift for the upcoming release. The team plans to move built in checks away from Pester wrappers and into a native test model so the engine can fully manage the complete lifecycle of each security assessment. Under the new design every check will consist of a PowerShell script and a Markdown file with execution metadata declared directly on the test function. This structured approach allows the core engine to centrally handle prerequisites like verifying active connections and licenses while maintaining backward compatibility for organizations running existing custom Pester tests. Seems kind of similar to what I’m doing with Guerrilla.

👉 https://github.com/maester365/maester/discussions/2050

Active Directory Meets Source Control with Fred Weinmann

Fred Weinmann recently joined Andrew on The PowerShell Podcast to kick off a multi episode series exploring his extensive open source module portfolio. This initial installment focuses exclusively on the Active Directory Management Framework which is a configuration driven system Fred originally built while working as a Microsoft field engineer for a massive enterprise customer.

Jake Hildreth Brings The Elm Architecture to PowerShell with PSTea

Jake Hildreth has released PSTea, an open source PowerShell module that implements The Elm Architecture, the Model-View-Update pattern, for building interactive terminal user interfaces. The clever part is portability. The same application code that runs as a TUI in your console will also serve to a browser over WebSocket and xterm.js without changing a single line, so one app runs in two places. Jake cites BubbleTea, LipGloss, and Textual as influences, along with the Commodore 64 and DOS for good measure, and the module gives you a clean Init, Update, and View loop driven by keypress messages. It has been in development quietly for months and just surfaced publicly, making it the framework worth watching underneath his growing collection of terminal tools.

👉 https://github.com/jakehildreth/PSTea

Mark Orr Rebuilds the Autopilot Import GUI for v1 and v2

Mark Orr has published Get-WindowsAutopilotImportCommunity, a graphical front end for Andrew S. Taylor’s community Autopilot script that finally handles both enrollment generations in one place. It is a ground up rewrite of Ugur Koç’s original import GUI, which wrapped Michael Niehaus’ Get-WindowsAutoPilotInfo and therefore only ever spoke Autopilot v1 with its hardware hash. Mark’s version runs on the community script and supports Autopilot v1 hardware hashes alongside Autopilot v2 Device Preparation identifiers, so the tool keeps working as tenants move to the newer model. He also traded the old fixed size window for a resizable, grid based layout with sidebar navigation, and the code ties into orr365.tools, the new home he stood up for his tooling this week.

👉 https://github.com/markorr321/Get-WindowsAutopilotImportCommunity

Exchange Online PowerShell 3.10.1 Fixes CBA Bug

Tony Redmond explores the recent release of Exchange Online Management version 3.10.1 and its fix for a breaking certificate based authentication flow bug. Tony details his troubleshooting experience after automation scripts suddenly began throwing 401 forbidden errors on REST based cmdlets despite successfully establishing a session.

👉 Exchange Online Management 3.10.1 Update

Hijacking the Windows Lock Screen with PowerShell

Frank Lindenblatt recently took the stage at the PowerShell Conference Europe to deliver a fast paced presentation on engineering a reliable custom lock screen slideshow. He explained that the default Windows personalization settings and classic screen savers proved too inconsistent for reliably displaying informational slides to corporate users.

PSScriptTools Adds Console Formatting Commands

Jeffery Hicks recently took to LinkedIn to announce a new release of his PSScriptTools module for the PowerShell Gallery. The update introduces several new commands that allow engineers to examine enums, generate formatted boxes, and visualize process trees directly in the terminal. He also highlighted the addition of horizontal rule lines for clearer output structuring and noted that administrators can run Open-PSScriptToolsHelp to pull up the complete module documentation.

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7488612147288014848/

👉 https://github.com/jdhitsolutions/PSScriptTools

Visualizing Nested Properties with DumPS

Harm Veenstra recently published a new guide on his PowerShell is fun blog detailing how to leverage the dumPS module to simplify debugging directly in the terminal. The tool solves the common frustration of reading deeply nested object properties when you are working outside of Visual Studio Code. Harm demonstrates how to install the package and pipe standard commands into the Out-Dump cmdlet to generate color coded and structured output while easily preserving the original objects in the pipeline.

👉 https://powershellisfun.com/2026/07/24/using-dumps-in-powershell-for-easy-reading-of-all-properties/

Navigating IT Chaos in Game Development

Michael Adams recently joined Brock on the PDQ Patch Notes series to unpack his two decades of horizontal career growth across various tech sectors. The conversation explores the unique challenges of managing infrastructure for a remote game development studio where maintaining peak performance hardware and surviving production crunches require significant operational agility.

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

PowerShell 7.7 Preview 3 Brings Time Sortable UUIDs

PowerShell version 7.7 preview 3 is now available and running on the .NET 11 preview 6 framework. The biggest change updates the New Guid cmdlet to generate version 7 time sortable UUIDs by default. Scripts requiring purely random output must now call the system guid class directly. The team also fixed progress bar rendering for double width unicode characters and optimized packaging to deliver a minimum size payload for arm64 deployments.

👉 v7.7.0-preview.3 Release of PowerShell

July 2026 PowerShell Community Call and Platform Updates

The July 2026 PowerShell Community Call highlighted several important milestones. The team announced that PowerShell versions 7.4 and 7.5 will reach end of life in November. A preview for PowerShell 7.7 featuring .NET 11 integration is arriving soon. The team also released Platypus version 1.0.2 to resolve structural issues with MAML formatting. Furthermore the intermittent Lucene search indexing issue on the PowerShell Gallery has been successfully resolved.

👉 July 2026 Community Call Transcript

Jake Hildreth on PSConf EU and Stepper Updates

Jake Hildreth recently joined the PowerShell Podcast to discuss his experiences presenting at the PowerShell Conference Europe and to highlight new updates to his open source Stepper module. The tool allows engineers to build resumable step by step scripts that eliminate the need to restart long running automation tasks if a failure occurs. Jake detailed recent additions including automatic logging and named steps before shifting the conversation to strongly advocate for taking dedicated time away from the keyboard to prevent industry burnout.

👉 The PowerShell Podcast E238

Jorge Suarez Put an Entire Slide Deck Inside Your Terminal

Jorge Suarez shipped a cross-platform PowerShell module that builds and delivers ANSI-rendered slide decks without ever leaving the console. Install-Module TerminalSlides, PowerShell 7.4+, MIT.

The slide DSL covers text, bullets, code, charts, diagrams, tables, quotes, boxes, notes, and images, driven by a fluent deck-building API. Eight built in themes ship out of the boxwith custom theme authoring if none of those fit. Interactive mode gives you keyboard navigation and a progress bar; non-interactive export targets CI and doc pipelines. Import and export runs through PSD1, JSON, Markdown, HTML, ANSI, and plain text.

👉 GitHub · Docs · PSGallery

David Sass Built a Resume Scanner That Never Phones Home

ATSScannerButWithPrivacy

Every “free ATS resume checker” on the web wants your resume uploaded to their server. David Sass built the version that doesn’t. ATS Scanner runs locally, parses your .pdf or .docx, and reports how it will fare against real applicant tracking systems, with your document staying on your machine the entire time. Check it out below.

👉 GitHub

Enums for Everyone

Jeff Hicks explores how to properly use enums in your scripting projects. It clarifies the subtle distinction between standard .NET properties and true enumeration classes. You can also easily build custom enums directly from the console using a simple one line command to improve your coding efficiency.

👉 Enums for Everyone

Teams PowerShell 7.9 Adds WAM and Federated Chat Controls

Tony Redmond breaks down what shipped in the July 19 release of the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module. Two things matter here. First, Connect MicrosoftTeams now runs through Windows Account Manager for authentication, joining the Graph SDK and Exchange Online modules on that path, and yes, that means new fun with the ongoing assembly clash issue. Second, and more usefully, the module now exposes Set CsTenantFederationConfiguration options to lock down federated group chats through EnableExternalAccessRestrictionsForChatParticipants and EnableMutualFederationForChatParticipants. If federation control has been on your list, this is the release that gives it to you.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/07/24/federated-chat-controls/

Mark Orr turned a click heavy portal chore into one command

Access-Package-OnDemand handles the Entra ID Entitlement Management workflow the portal is worst at: granting access to someone you already know needs it. Start-AccessPackageOnDemand gives you sign-in, package picker, batch email entry, and canned justifications in one pass. Best part is inline resolution: every address is checked against the directory and existing assignments and color-labeled before you submit, so typos and already-provisioned users surface first. Auto end-dates, stuck-request recovery, cross-platform MSAL auth. PowerShell 7 required. Delivery is async and takes three to six minutes, which is Microsoft's clock, not his.

👉 Access Packages On-Demand with PowerShell

Permissions Creep Can Kill Your Graph SDK Session

Tony Redmond hit a wall running Connect MgGraph with the Scopes parameter and traced it to something every long running tenant is heading toward. The Microsoft Graph Command Line Tools app collects delegated permissions every time someone consents to a new scope, and there is an undocumented ceiling somewhere around 140 permissions.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/07/23/permissions-creep-sdk/

Events

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California

The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas

Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference

👉 https://psconf.eu/

PSGuerrilla is Now Guerrilla

PSGuerrilla is now Guerrilla. If you have it installed, that’s the part that affects you: the PSGallery package name changed, so it’s Install-PSResource Guerrilla now. The old PSGuerrilla listing stays up pointing at the new one, but it won’t get updates. Gallery names are permanent and there’s no redirect, so this is a one time move I had to make by hand.

Why drop the PS? Because the prefix names the implementation language, not the job. That’s the right call for a utility library (PSReadLine really is PowerShell plumbing) and the wrong call for something trying to be a tool in its own right. Pester didn’t need it. dbatools didn’t need it. The tell was that everything around the project had already dropped it without asking me: the domain has been guerrilla.army for a while, the philosophy has always been Guerrilla Zero Trust, and the module manifest was the last thing still introducing itself by its shell. The rename is the small story.

The bigger one is that I deleted about half the module. Guerrilla had sprawled into monitors, alert channels, schedulers, and threat feeds. That’s detection, which is a job other platforms do full time and better. I really wanted to do some monitoring piece to this project, but they are two different things that I feel like had to be separated. The exported surface went from 67 commands to 34, and everything that survived serves one loop: assess, score, compare, report. Deleting code you wrote is harder than writing it (like scary in a way, but also I hate scoping something back because I always want to go big). It was still the right call, and the module is better for being smaller.

What’s left, honestly stated: 636 checks across Active Directory, Entra ID / M365, and Google Workspace, mapped to CISA SCuBA, EIDSCA, CIS, NIST SP 800-53, and MITRE ATT&CK. 1,829 golden fixtures gate every release, because a check that renders a verdict nobody tested is just an opinion with a color attached (this is how I’m checking things that I can’t yet validate in a production environment because I don’t have it in a production environment). When a check cannot assess something, it says Not Assessed and stays out of the score. Absence of evidence is never a pass. I’ll be talking through the whole philosophy behind it next week at Midwest Tech Talk.

That said, I could really use your help! I would love to add more contributors to Guerrilla to make useful for everyone around the world. Check out the repo here: https://github.com/jimrtyler/guerrilla

Microsoft Ships a Record 570 CVEs and Three Zero Days in One Patch Tuesday

Tuesday’s Patch Tuesday came in at 570 vulnerabilities across Windows, SharePoint Server, Office, .NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and the rest of the Microsoft catalog. That is roughly triple last month and easily the largest single release on record. Three of them are zero days. Two are being actively exploited: CVE-2026-56155, an AD FS elevation of privilege bug that Microsoft’s own DART team discovered while investigating live incidents, and a SharePoint Server on premise flaw. The third is a publicly disclosed BitLocker bypass. If you run AD FS or on premise SharePoint, patch this weekend. Microsoft also confirmed the volume is partly the output of their AI assisted vulnerability discovery pipeline, so this is likely the new normal.

👉 https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-july-2026-patch-tuesday-fixes-massive-570-flaws-3-zero-days/

Huntress Catches a Threat Actor Deploying AI Generated PowerShell Against Active Directory

This one deserves your full attention. Huntress recovered a PowerShell script called Untitled1.ps1 from a real intrusion in early June, and Jevon Ang and Dray Agha published the full breakdown this week. The script is a textbook Active Directory enumeration tool, complete with a cascading five step fallback for locating the domain controller, and it is almost certainly AI generated. The tells include an unedited placeholder server name the attacker never bothered to change and an internal title that reads “100% Working AD Information Gathering Script - FULLY FIXED.”

👉 https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/attacker-uses-suspected-ai-generated.html

Write the Test First: Robert Prüst on Pester, PSConf, and Learning in Public

Andrew Pla and Robert Prüst spend an hour on Pester and why testing is the essential safety net for AI generated PowerShell. Given the Huntress story this week, the timing is uncomfortably good. 👉

Tony Redmond on Identifying Obsolete SharePoint Sites with PowerShell

Tony wrote up a Reddit question about identifying obsolete SharePoint Online sites and turned it into a full walkthrough for scanning a tenant with PowerShell. He pulls usage data from the Graph, cross references it against basic site properties from SharePoint, and lands on a report an admin can act on. The example filters for sites owned by inactive users with less than a gigabyte of data and no modifications since 2024, but the pattern is the useful part. Get-MgSite, Entra ID app registration, application permissions, hash table processing. Practical.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/07/13/find-obsolete-sites/

Entra Connect Sync 2.6.84 Fixes What 2.6.79 Broke

A few weeks ago Microsoft released Entra Connect Sync 2.6.79, discovered a bug, and pulled it. Version 2.6.84 shipped Tuesday as the corrected release. If you deferred the last update cycle because of the pulled build, this is your green light. Andres has the release notes and installer link.

👉 https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/07/14/entra-connect-sync-2-6-84-released/

Fred Weinmann Wraps Seven Years of Work on the Active Directory Management Framework

Friedrich Weinmann from Microsoft Security Automation took over PowerShell Wednesday this week to walk through Active Directory Management Framework, the configuration as code project he has been building for seven and a half years. This week’s milestone ships the last major security piece the framework needed, and Fred rebuilt the website at admf.one in the same push. The pitch is straightforward. Put your entire AD topology, group policies, access rules, schema extensions, and delegations into source control, generate a diff between the plan and what is actually in your domain, then decide which changes you want to apply. This is where ADMF beats Desired State Configuration for real world AD work. DSC is all or nothing. ADMF lets you accept the seven changes you can push today and defer the three that depend on another team. Works for a single forest or for hundreds of them, runs locally or from a remote machine without a trust required, and Fred demoed the whole loop live against a real domain.

Microsoft.Graph PowerShell SDK 2.38.1 Released

A point release addressing issues in 2.38.0 shipped Monday. Andres notes both the Microsoft.Graph and Microsoft.Graph.Beta modules are updated. Given how many admins run into odd behaviors after the 2.38 line dropped in June, this is worth pulling into your baseline.

👉 https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/07/13/microsoft-graph-powershell-modules-2-38-1-released/

Harm Veenstra Renewed as Microsoft MVP for 2026-2027

Great community news to close on. Harm Veenstra, who runs PowerShellIsFun.com and produces some of the most consistently useful practical PowerShell writing anywhere, was renewed as a Microsoft MVP for another year on Wednesday (yes, I noted above already, but he has a blog post on it haha). Harm has been publishing weekly on his blog for years, and his consistency is a big part of what makes him a community anchor. Congratulations.

👉 https://powershellisfun.com/2026/07/16/microsoft-powershell-mvp-2026-2027/

Events

Midwest Tech Talk 2026 | July 19 to 21, 2026 | Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri I am speaking at this one - actually keynoting :)

👉 https://www.midwesttechtalk.com/

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California
The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas
Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida
The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference
👉 https://psconf.eu/

Merill Fernando left Microsoft to focus entirely on Maester and ensure the open source tool continues evolving alongside Microsoft 365 security. To help fund the core project, his team just launched Maester Cloud as a portal companion that lets administrators track tenant results over time. Organizations can now sponsor the effort while gaining a multi tenant dashboard for their daily monitoring tasks.

👉 https://maester.cloud

PowerShell + Proxmox: Open Source Virtualization Unleashed

Raimund Andree details how the German army uses the Dagger project to manage their mobile data centers. Following a major move away from VMware, this session demonstrates how they adapt the DSC workshop blueprint to fully automate Proxmox environments.

Hunting Down Inactive Distribution Lists

Tony Redmond updated his script for finding inactive distribution lists to use the newer Get-MessageTraceV2 cmdlet. Because the cmdlet restricts queries to ten day windows, the revised code loops through nine separate chunks to build a full ninety day history of group expansion events. The script then compares your existing groups against that compiled history to help you safely clean up stale objects.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/07/09/inactive-distribution-list-2026/

Building Better SharePoint with PowerShell with Dan Adams | The PowerShell Podcast

My good friend Andrew Pla sits down with Microsoft 365 veteran Dan Adams to discuss the often misunderstood world of SharePoint and the shift toward Microsoft Graph. They dive into a custom PowerShell module Dan built for assessing and benchmarking tenant environments, proving that the bad reputation of SharePoint is usually about the builder instead of the platform itself.

Delivering a PowerShell Mail Solution

Jeff Hicks wraps up his recent scripting challenge by finalizing his custom PowerShell mail delivery tool. The latest installment covers handling file attachments using native .NET classes and managing SMTP configuration data. He reminds readers that the process of building the module teaches more than the final code itself.

👉 https://buttondown.com/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/delivering-a-powershell-mail-solution/

Microsoft Graph with PowerShell 101

Jan-Hendrik Peters delivers an essential primer on navigating Microsoft Graph using PowerShell. This session breaks down the fundamentals of authentication and querying to help administrators transition away from legacy modules.

Using the PowerShell Webserver Module

Microsoft MVP Harm Veenstra highlights a community module that lets you spin up a local web server without installing IIS. The tool leverages native .NET classes to provide a quick interface for remote command execution, script execution, and file transfers. While not meant for production environments, it offers a fantastic lightweight option for home labs and quick testing.

👉 https://powershellisfun.com/2026/07/03/using-the-powershell-webserver-module/

How to use Azure Functions to run PowerShell scripts in Entra ID Governance

Christian Frohn explains how to replace an Azure Automation account with an Azure Function for Lifecycle Workflows. The guide covers adapting existing PowerShell scripts to accept HTTP requests and return proper status codes instead of standard exit commands. You will also find steps for deploying the setup through Azure DevOps pipelines and configuring Logic Apps to handle the final task result.

👉 https://www.christianfrohn.dk/2026/07/01/how-to-use-azure-functions-to-run-powershell-scripts-in-entra-id-governance/

Events

Midwest Tech Talk 2026 | July 19 to 21, 2026 | Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri I am speaking at this one in just over two weeks. Kickoff event Sunday July 19, main conference Monday and Tuesday at The Resort at Lake of the Ozarks, with an evening event Monday hosted by Provision Data Solutions. Two day K12 technology and security symposium built by folks who actually run school district tech departments, doubling as the K12TechPro Regional Meetup for the Midwest. If you are in K12 IT anywhere in the region, this is the one to make this summer.

👉 https://www.midwesttechtalk.com/

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall. Strong K12 IT representation if you are looking for peers in that space.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event. The pricing is genuinely reasonable for the caliber of content, and if you have a hybrid IT day job the tracks tend to hit the practical stuff you can use Monday morning.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida ThreatLocker’s seventh annual cybersecurity training event lands at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando. Three days of hands on training, real attack technique walkthroughs, hacking labs, and Cyber Hero Certification exam sessions every morning. If you defend an environment for a living, this one is built for you.

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando. Call for papers opened Wednesday and runs through the summer, and early bird registration is open now. The OnRamp program for newcomers runs alongside the main track.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference Europe after this year’s tenth anniversary run in Wiesbaden. Watch psconf.eu for the announcement, which typically lands toward the end of summer.

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Elsewhere the community kept moving. Andres Bohren posted through the holiday week with module release notes, Tony followed up his book launch with practical pieces on Teams and Copilot, and Jeff Hicks used his June potluck to say goodbye to the Lonely Administrator blog.

I have had numerous serious udpateds to my PSGuerrilla module (Install-Module PSGuerrilla) - https://github.com/jimrtyler/PSGuerrilla - Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! We are now sitting at v2.38.0.

Congrats to all of the new Microsoft MVPs that were welcomed to the program this week!

Build Your Own PowerShell AI Terminal Copilot

Bart Pasmans demonstrates how to construct a custom AI terminal assistant using PowerShell and Azure OpenAI. His two script solution takes natural language requests and generates the exact commands needed alongside a built in risk assessment system to prevent accidental infrastructure damage. This approach provides a highly customizable alternative to commercial tools by letting administrators control execution safety directly from the shell.

👉 https://bartpasmans.tech/powershell-ai-terminal-copilot/

Microsoft 365 for IT Pros 2027 Edition Ships as a Four Book Bundle

Tony Redmond and the Office 365 for IT Pros team published the 2027 edition on Wednesday, and the rename to Microsoft 365 for IT Pros is only the headline change. The bundle now consists of four separate books. The main Microsoft 365 for IT Pros volume sits at just over 900 pages after being trimmed from the roughly 1,300 pages the 2026 edition carried. The 431 page Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell third edition that Tony launched last week is book two. The Microsoft Purview for IT Pros and Power Platform for IT Pros volumes are new standalone books built from four chapters lifted out of the main volume. The main book carries a new Managing AI and Agents chapter covering Microsoft 365 Copilot, Agent 365, and Work IQ. If you subscribed to the 2026 edition, the renewal code landed in your inbox on Wednesday morning.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/07/01/microsoft-365-for-it-pros/

Jeff Hicks June Potluck Marks the End of The Lonely Administrator

Jeff Hicks used his June potluck for the news on the SecretManagement archive and the Summit 2027 CFP opening, plus a run through the PSReadline CopyScreen key handler that lets you select terminal output with the shift arrow keys and copy it to the clipboard on Enter. He also drops a recommendation for The Microsoft DSC Handbook on Leanpub covering DSC v3, announces his return to SpiceWorld in Austin on November 12 and 13, and closes with the news that he is deprecating his long running WordPress blog The Lonely Administrator later this year. If you have posts from there you have relied on over the years, grab them now while they are still online. The scripting challenge this month is a VHD backup tool that pushes on both PowerShell and storage fundamentals.

👉 https://buttondown.com/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/

Andres Bohren Ran the Module Release Board All Week

Andres Bohren kept his usual pace through the holiday week and shipped four module release notes worth pulling. Microsoft published a new version of the MicrosoftPlaces PowerShell module on both June 30 and July 3, so you probably want the July 3 build if you have not updated recently. Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell 16.0.27424.12000 landed on June 30 with the usual mix of authentication and provisioning refinements. Microsoft shipped a new PowerToys build this week that Andres notes on July 3 for anyone running the utility suite. And Git ticked up to 2.55.0 on July 1, which Andres covers with his usual install walkthrough using winget. If you follow one blog for Microsoft module release notes, Andres is still the one to read.

👉 https://blog.icewolf.ch/

Teaching Tara: PowerShell Script Breakdown

Andrew Pla and Tara Sinquefield sit down together and read through scripts as a team. Tara asks the beginner questions the rest of us stopped asking a long time ago, and Andrew explains variables, param blocks, sub expressions, calculated properties, and the pipeline at the pace of someone just starting to learn. If you have anyone on your team who is trying to pick up PowerShell, this is the episode to send them. Bonus AI discussion at the end on where Claude and ChatGPT actually help learners versus lead them into bad habits.

Morten Mynster Kristensen Spots New Graph Beta Permissions for Creating Defender Alerts

Fellow PowerShell MVP and LeastPrivilegedMSGraph author Morten Mynster Kristensen flagged this week that Microsoft quietly landed two new Beta permissions on Microsoft Graph, SecurityAlert.Create.All in both delegated and application forms. The endpoint at /security/alerts_v2 now accepts POST, which means you can create your own alerts in Microsoft Defender XDR from PowerShell rather than only reading them. For anyone who has built detection logic in a script and had to route the output to email, a Teams webhook, or a Sentinel ingestion pipeline, the ability to write directly into the Defender queue is a meaningful architectural shift. I plan to get support for this into my PSGuerrilla module.

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mortenmynster_powershell-msgraph-automation-activity-7345854938947694593

Tony Redmond on the Small Window for Incoming Teams Calls

Tony Redmond writes that a recent Microsoft Teams improvement is buried deep enough in settings that most users will never find it. Incoming Teams calls can now be answered in a small window rather than the full application view, and for people who take a lot of calls the difference is real. You can keep working in your primary application while the call runs in a small overlay rather than losing your context every time somebody rings. Tony’s frustration with the discoverability of the feature is fair. If you are a busy person on Teams, this is worth changing this weekend so it is on the next time you need it.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/30/teams-small-window/

PowerShell with Buttons

Andrew Pla and Stephen Valdinger at PSConfEU 2026 The PSConfEU 2026 session recording landed this week and it is a full ninety minute hands on walkthrough of PowerShell Universal from the two of them. Stephen Valdinger from Chocolatey Software leads the technical demo, Andrew Pla plays the perfect stand in for anyone getting reintroduced to PSU after a break, and the pair walk through turning a real PowerShell module into a full web application with a REST API layer, a SQLite back end, forms, dashboards, Pester unit tests, PSPlayright UI tests, and a new plaster template that scaffolds a full PSU app module for you in one command. This is the practical content that sends you straight to Adam Driscoll’s docs Sunday afternoon.

Windows 11 26H2 Prep Time Starts Now

Microsoft published the initial 26H2 announcement in late June and the message from the community is start testing. Jason Leznek’s Windows IT Pro Blog piece covers the upgrade paths, the Autopatch pilot to production strategy, and the tracking mechanisms available to walk your fleet through a controlled rollout. For K12 shops with student devices in the field, summer is the window to get the pilot ring stood up before the school year starts. The changes are not disruptive on the surface but the Autopatch story continues to mature and the discipline of running the pilot correctly compounds over years.

👉 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/get-ready-for-windows-11-version-26h2/ba-p/4529367

Encore: Lessons in Leadership from PowerShell Pioneers Jeffrey Snover and Don Jones

The encore of the April 28, 2025 conversation recorded live at the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit dropped fresh this week. Snover walks through the origin story of PowerShell and the pivotal moment his path crossed with Don’s, Don brings his usual thoughtful reflection on the shift from individual contributor to leader, and the throughline is that vulnerability, repetition, and kindness are core to any real career.

PSConfEU 2026 Session Archive

The rest of the PSConfEU 2026 sessions from Wiesbaden continue to upload on the SynEdgy channel through the summer. I shared Andrew’s above, but I could frankly load the newsletter if I wanted to. Deep technical content across PowerShell, DSC, PSU, security, and community sessions from the tenth anniversary edition of the conference.

👉 https://www.youtube.com/@synedgy

Events

Midwest Tech Talk 2026 | July 19 to 21, 2026 | Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri I am speaking at this one in just over two weeks. Kickoff event Sunday July 19, main conference Monday and Tuesday at The Resort at Lake of the Ozarks, with an evening event Monday hosted by Provision Data Solutions. Two day K12 technology and security symposium built by folks who actually run school district tech departments, doubling as the K12TechPro Regional Meetup for the Midwest. If you are in K12 IT anywhere in the region, this is the one to make this summer.

👉 https://www.midwesttechtalk.com/

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall. Strong K12 IT representation if you are looking for peers in that space.

👉 https://mmsmoa.com/

SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event. The pricing is genuinely reasonable for the caliber of content, and if you have a hybrid IT day job the tracks tend to hit the practical stuff you can use Monday morning.

👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida ThreatLocker’s seventh annual cybersecurity training event lands at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando. Three days of hands on training, real attack technique walkthroughs, hacking labs, and Cyber Hero Certification exam sessions every morning. If you defend an environment for a living, this one is built for you.

👉 https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando. Call for papers opened Wednesday and runs through the summer, and early bird registration is open now. The OnRamp program for newcomers runs alongside the main track.

👉 https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference Europe after this year’s tenth anniversary run in Wiesbaden. Watch psconf.eu for the announcement, which typically lands toward the end of summer.

👉 https://psconf.eu/

Fellow PowerShell MVP Jorge Suarez of IntuneHydrationKit fame shipped Tenant Graph, a free open source web app that renders Intune and Entra ID assignments as an interactive Three.js topology. Sign in with Microsoft Entra to search across users, devices, groups, apps, policies, and Conditional Access, with a Readable Mode that explains relationships in plain language and an admin impact panel for blast radius. The sample tenant at tenantgraph.com lands you in a Lumon themed demo with no auth required, so you can poke around before granting delegated Graph scopes against production.
👉https://github.com/jorgeasaurus/TenantGraph

Three big demos from the June PowerShell Community Call

Jason Helmick called the June PowerShell Community Call the summer edition, and what showed up was about as loaded a single hour as the call has run in a while. The PSConfEU recap took a few minutes. The servicing updates and a real warning about Azure AD Graph traffic took a few more. The Az PowerShell team showed off a login flow improvement that quietly fixes a problem every enterprise administrator has hit. And then three demos landed back to back to back, each of which would have been a headline in any other month. If you only have time to watch one segment of the recording, watch the demos. If you have time for the whole thing, the housekeeping is genuinely worth it this time.

Microsoft Ships DSC 3.3.0-preview.3 with New Windows Resources and Server Mode

Steve Lee dropped DSC 3.3.0-preview.3 on Wednesday with a handful of changes worth your attention. The build adds a Microsoft.Windows/WindowsFeatureList resource from Gijs Reijn for managing optional Windows features through DSC, plus a new Registry Adapter and Microsoft.Windows/Personalization resource that lets you target the registry for personalization configuration without writing a custom resource. Steve also renamed the previous MCP mode to Server mode, which is a cleaner name now that the protocol has settled into the broader tooling ecosystem. PSAdapter got two notable fixes from Steve, one for stream event tracing and one for modules with ScriptsToProcess that used to break. If you are testing DSC v3 in production, this is the preview to pull this weekend.

👉https://github.com/PowerShell/DSC/releases/tag/v3.3.0-preview.3

Andrew Pla and Leo D’Arcy Make the Case for Code Signing in CI/CD

My good friend Andrew Pla sat down with UK based cloud solutions architect Leo D’Arcy on The PowerShell Podcast for a candid conversation on Active Directory Certificate Services, code signing, and why so many organizations get PKI spectacularly wrong. The practical takeaway is the argument for adding a code signing step to your CI/CD pipeline as a scalable alternative to constrained language mode, which gives you cryptographic proof that scripts have not been tampered with without giving up flexibility. Leo runs the Remote Access User Group community on Discord and is a repeat PSConfEU speaker, so the conversation also ranges into the developer mindset taking over IT and why being able to talk networking with network engineers and business outcomes with leadership is the real career multiplier.

Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell 3rd Edition Ships

Tony Redmond and the Office 365 for IT Pros team published the third edition of Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell on Tuesday. The new edition runs 431 pages across eight chapters and is available now in EPUB and PDF from Gumroad, with the paperback landing on Amazon July 1. Coverage spans the base Microsoft 365 workloads, the Graph PowerShell SDK, Entra ID administration, workload automation, and the management APIs for sign in logs and audit data. The book comes bundled with the Microsoft 365 for IT Pros 2027 edition that also drops July 1, and current subscribers have already received the renewal code. If you write PowerShell for Microsoft 365 every day, this is the one to have on your desk.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/23/automating-microsoft-365-3rd/

Microsoft Graph SDK V2.38 and Exchange Online Module Refuse to Get Along

Tony Redmond writes that the newest Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK at V2.38 and the latest Exchange Online Management module are not playing nicely together, and the situation is getting worse rather than better. Loading both into the same session leads to assembly version conflicts that break authentication or cmdlet behavior in ways that are not always obvious until your script halts mid run. Tony goes through the workarounds, including running the two modules in separate sessions, and uses the post to highlight two cmdlets he discovered along the way that most administrators have probably never used. Worth a read before you trust a hybrid script in production.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/22/powershell-woes-and-cmdlets/

Find Inactive Teams Channels with Graph PowerShell

Tenants accumulate inactive Teams channels the same way garages accumulate cardboard. Tony Redmond walks through a PowerShell approach for finding channels that nobody has touched in months using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. The script pulls channel metadata, checks the last activity date, and gives you a sorted list of candidates to either archive or remove. What you do with the output is your call, but having a defensible list before the next governance review is a good start. Pair this with Tony’s deleted Teams chat threads piece from last week for a fuller Teams hygiene toolkit.

👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/24/find-inactive-channels/

Andres Bohren Ships M365 Service Monitor PowerShell 1.7

Andres Bohren updated his M365 Service Monitor script to version 1.7 this week with two practical fixes worth picking up. The June 17 patch fixed the modern HTML rendering for Outlook classic, which was breaking the dashboard for anyone still on the legacy client. The June 14 patch fixed path issues that tripped scheduled runs and added the date to the HTML output so you can see at a glance when the report last ran. The script polls the Service Communications API and produces a clean status dashboard you can drop into a SharePoint page or email out on a schedule. The GitHub repo has the full update notes and the latest module.

👉 https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/24/basic-M365-monitoring-with-powershell-1-7/

What Do You Really Get with Intune Suite in E3 and E5

Andrew Taylor wrote the Intune Suite breakdown you want to read before July 1. Starting next Wednesday, Intune Suite features fold into Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 instead of requiring a separate add on, and Andrew walks through what each component does and how much of it you will actually use. He covers Endpoint Privilege Management, Remote Help with unattended access, Advanced Analytics with Device Query and Multi Device Query, Microsoft Tunnel for mobile app access to on premise resources, and Cloud PKI. If you have been paying for the Intune Suite add on separately, you may be about to free up budget. If you have not, you may be about to get capabilities you did not know you had.

👉 https://andrewstaylor.com/2026/06/24/what-do-i-really-get-with-intune-suite/

Events

Midwest Tech Talk 2026 | July 19 to 21, 2026 | Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri I am speaking at this one. Kickoff event Sunday July 19, main conference Monday and Tuesday at The Resort at Lake of the Ozarks, with an evening event Monday hosted by Provision Data Solutions. Two day K12 technology and security symposium built by folks who actually run school district tech departments, doubling as the K12TechPro Regional Meetup for the Midwest. If you are in K12 IT anywhere in the region, this is the one to make this summer.

https://www.midwesttechtalk.com/

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall. Strong K12 IT representation if you are looking for peers in that space.

https://mmsmoa.com/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida ThreatLocker’s seventh annual cybersecurity training event lands in Orlando. Three days of hands on training, real attack technique walkthroughs, hacking labs, and Cyber Hero Certification exam sessions every morning. It was a blast this year - I’d recommend you check it out. It’s not very expensive.

https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 26 to 29, 2027 | Bellevue, Washington The flagship US PowerShell event. Registration tends to fill early, and the call for speakers usually opens in late summer if you are thinking about submitting.

https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference Europe after this year’s tenth anniversary run in Wiesbaden. Watch psconf.eu for the announcement, which typically lands toward the end of summer.

https://psconf.eu/

Install-Module PSGuerrilla

Then, you can now launch the GUI with

Show-Guerrilla

And get a nice fancy report like this one, though hopefully not this failed :)

Videos, Videos, Videos!!!

The PowerShell Global DevOps Summit videos are now LIVE! They began dropping videos earlier this week. Here is the entire playlist.

The Same for PSConfEU! Everything is live on here on this playlist:

How Much Will July 2026 License Increases Cost Your Tenant

July 1, 2026, is the day Microsoft starts charging tenants more for nearly every license in the M365 catalog. Tony Redmond serves up a PowerShell script that retrieves the licenses assigned across your users, applies the published increase rates for each affected product, and returns the real monthly impact for your tenant. The increase rates vary by SKU and the script handles the variation cleanly. If you have not already had this conversation with your finance team, this is the read for this weekend. Pair it with last week’s piece on stale accounts and you have a complete pre July audit kit.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/16/monthly-license-increase-july-2026/

PowerShell 7.6.3 Released as Current LTS

Microsoft shipped PowerShell 7.6.3 on Tuesday and Andres Bohren has the install walkthrough on his blog. The build sits on the .NET 10.0.9 runtime, and the headline shift for Mac shops is that the macOS PKG package is now notarized and signed by Microsoft, closing a long standing gap for production deployments on Apple silicon. 7.6.3 is the current LTS, while the previous LTS at 7.4.17 still has support through November 10, 2026, so the upgrade can be planned rather than scrambled. Worth dropping into your test ring this weekend.

https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/16/powershell-7-6-3-released/

Microsoft.Graph PowerShell SDK 2.38.0 Ships

Same Tuesday, Microsoft also pushed version 2.38.0 of both the Microsoft.Graph and Microsoft.Graph.Beta modules to the PowerShell Gallery. Andres notes that Microsoft did not publish release notes for this one, but the comparing changes view on GitHub fills the gap if you want to know exactly what shifted between 2.37 and 2.38. Andres continues to install through PSResourceGet with the Microsoft Artifact Registry rather than the older PowerShellGet workflow, which mirrors where Microsoft is steering everyone for first party module installation. If you have not switched over yet, this is the release to do it on. https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/16/microsoft-graph-powershell-modules-2-38-0-released/

Microsoft Tightens Self Service Password Reset in September

Tony Redmond writes that Microsoft is closing a soft spot in Self Service Password Reset starting September 6, 2026. Today, SSPR can fall back on directory attributes to verify a user, which is a risk because those attributes can be modified by an attacker who has already compromised an account. The new behavior requires every user to register at least one authentication method through their Security Info page, and SSPR verifies identity only through that registered method. Microsoft kicks off a registration campaign on July 6 to push users and administrators to register before enforcement. Get your registration reporting in place now so the campaign does not surprise you.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/17/sspr-authentication-methods/

Removing Problematic Teams Chat Threads with Graph PowerShell

Sometimes a user posts something to Teams that has to come down, and the standard admin experience does not make that easy. Tony Redmond walks through the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets to find chat threads, scan thread messages for the targeted content, and remove the offending threads. The script can run interactively for one off cleanup, or get wrapped into a tenant maintenance routine if this is something you handle regularly. If you have ever scrambled to pull a bad chat thread out of Teams in the middle of an incident, this one is worth a bookmark. https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/15/delete-teams-chat-threads/

Andres Bohren Marks 3000 Blog Posts

Andres Bohren hit a milestone this week with his 3000th blog post, written 19 years after his first post in November 2007. He calculated the average using New TimeSpan in PowerShell, naturally, and worked out that he has published a blog post roughly every other day for almost two decades. The archive spans Exchange, Outlook, ESX, SQL, Active Directory, and of course PowerShell, and the consistency is what got him recognized as a Microsoft MVP. If you want a single example of what consistent community contribution looks like over a career, his archive is the model.

https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/18/celebrating-3000-blog-articles/

PowerShell Universal, Community, and the Magic of Showing Up with Adriano Carollo

My good friend Andrew Pla and Berlin sysadmin Adriano Carollo on city swings then over dinner at PSConfEU 2026. Adriano covers how PowerShell Universal pulled him into web app territory through React and JavaScript, why he built an open source personal assistant in PowerShell, and what it took to pay his own way to the conference after Andrew's podcast convinced him to show up. Andrew shares his own origin story for the first time on the show.

Microsoft Artifact Registry Hits Its Stride with the 2.38 Release

The Microsoft.Graph 2.38 release this week is another data point in the steady migration that Microsoft is running to shift first party PowerShell modules from the community PowerShell Gallery to the Microsoft Artifact Registry. Andres Bohren installs every Microsoft module through MAR using PSResourceGet, and his M365PSProfile module wraps the workflow if you want a turnkey way to keep your tenant tools current. The pitch is straightforward. MAR is a Microsoft controlled feed with stronger provenance and ownership guarantees than the community gallery, which has had its share of compromised module incidents. If your environment still pulls Microsoft modules from PSGallery by default, this is the year to swap.

https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/16/microsoft-graph-powershell-modules-2-38-0-released/

Events

Midwest Tech Talk 2026 | July 19 to 21, 2026 | Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri I am speaking at this one. Kickoff event Sunday July 19, main conference Monday and Tuesday at The Resort at Lake of the Ozarks, with an evening event Monday hosted by Provision Data Solutions. Two day K12 technology and security symposium built by folks who actually run school district tech departments, doubling as the K12TechPro Regional Meetup for the Midwest. If you are in K12 IT anywhere in the region, this is the one to make this summer.

https://www.midwesttechtalk.com/

MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall. Strong K12 IT representation if you are looking for peers in that space.

https://mmsmoa.com/

Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida ThreatLocker’s seventh annual cybersecurity training event lands in Orlando. Three days of hands on training, real attack technique walkthroughs, hacking labs, and Cyber Hero Certification exam sessions every morning. It was a blast this year - I’d recommend you check it out. It’s not very expensive.

https://ztw.com/

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 26 to 29, 2027 | Bellevue, Washington The flagship US PowerShell event. Registration tends to fill early, and the call for speakers usually opens in late summer if you are thinking about submitting.

https://powershellsummit.org/

PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference Europe after this year’s tenth anniversary run in Wiesbaden. Watch psconf.eu for the announcement, which typically lands toward the end of summer.

https://psconf.eu/

Mastering PowerShell Parameters with Jeff Hicks at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2026

Jeff Hicks delivered a session packed with demos on advanced parameter design at this year’s PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit in Bellevue, and Confreaks has the recording up on YouTube. He walks through advanced validation methods, leveraging types for greater efficiency, dynamic parameters, experimental features, and the techniques introduced in PowerShell 7 that make your function parameters do real work. If you write functions you ship to other people, this is the kind of session worth a weekend hour.

Microsoft to Delete Unlicensed OneDrive for Business Accounts

Tony Redmond at Office 365 for IT Pros wrote up Microsoft’s decision to start deleting unlicensed OneDrive for Business accounts that have not been paid to be archived, with the change taking effect after July 2026. Up until now those accounts could linger in Microsoft 365 Archive until retention policies and holds expired, but going forward tenants will have to decide which accounts to keep and pay for, and the rest will be removed regardless of retention or eDiscovery holds. This is a meaningful policy shift that anyone with messy offboarding hygiene needs to read before next month rolls around.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/12/unlicensed-onedrive-for-business-2/

Cookie Monsters and Defender Live Response with Miriam Wiesner on The PowerShell Podcast

My good friend, Andrew Pla, sat down with Miriam Wiesner at PSConfEU 2026 in Wiesbaden for a wide ranging conversation on cookie theft attacks, Defender live response, and the state of PowerShell security. Miriam, a security research PM at Microsoft working on Defender and Sentinel research, walked through her Return of the Cookie Monsters session where she demonstrated extracting Teams cookies to hijack chats, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive content from a single compromised endpoint. She also recapped the live response session she delivered with Stefan Fanulik on using Defender to investigate and remediate compromised devices without enabling RDP or PowerShell remoting. The conversation closes with a frank discussion of why PowerShell security features make life harder for sophisticated threat actors and why visibility through script block logging matters more than ever.

Adam Driscoll Recaps PSConfEU 2026 and Demos PowerShell Universal AI Tooling

Adam Driscoll posted his PSConfEU 2026 recap over at the Devolutions blog, sharing both the personal experience and the technical headline from his two sessions at the conference. The news from his sessions is PowerShell Universal 2026.2 with new AI tooling focused on MCP tools and agents, where Adam demonstrated building modules, APIs, and web apps using GitHub Copilot connected directly to a PowerShell Universal instance and generating real solutions from simple prompts. Devolutions stepped up as the key sponsor of the conference this year, and the recap is worth a read if you want to understand what has shipped in PowerShell Universal since the acquisition.

https://devolutions.net/blog/psconfeu-celebrating-ten-years-of-powershell-community/

Setting Up Least Privileged MS Graph on PowerShell Wednesday with Morten Mynster and Jake Hildreth

Andrew Pla hosted Morten Mynster and Jake Hildreth on PowerShell Wednesday this week for a walkthrough of the prerequisites to use Morten’s Least Privileged MS Graph module, the open source tool Morten built for auditing and reducing permission exposure across Microsoft Graph applications. Jake plays the friendly guinea pig live on his own tenant while Morten walks him through creating the Azure resource group, log analytics workspace, diagnostic settings for Microsoft Graph Activity Logs, the app registration, and the right API permissions. The session ran as part one of two, with next week’s installment digging into what the module actually reports once the logs roll in.

Tony Redmond Primers Sensitivity Labels with PowerShell

Tony Redmond put together a primer on the three different cmdlets available for fetching sensitivity labels with PowerShell, one in the Exchange Online module and two powered by Graph APIs. The differences come down to scope, properties returned, and whether you get the full set of available labels or just a slice. Worth bookmarking if you have ever stared at the output of one of these cmdlets and wondered why it does not match what you see in the Purview admin center.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/11/sensitivity-label-ps/

PowerToys v0.100.0 Released

Andres Bohren over at Icewolf marked the release of PowerToys v0.100.0, the round number milestone version of Microsoft’s open source utility suite for Windows power users. Andres includes his usual install walkthrough using winget along with notes on where to find the release artifacts on GitHub. If PowerToys has earned a spot on your daily driver, this is the version to install this weekend.

https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/11/powertoys-v0-100-0-released/

ExchangeOnlineManagement PowerShell Module 3.10.0 Released

Andres Bohren also covered Microsoft pushing version 3.10.0 of the ExchangeOnlineManagement PowerShell module to the gallery. The headline change is that the minimum required version of PowerShell 7 is now 7.6, while Windows PowerShell 5.1 remains unaffected. The release also fixes an issue where certificate authentication failed in Connect-IPPSSession when using the EnableSearchOnlySession switch, which is worth knowing if you script against Exchange Online in production.

https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/10/exchangeonlinemanagement-3-10-0-released/

PDQ Breaks Down June 2026 Patch Tuesday

The PDQ team is back with their monthly Patch Tuesday recap, and June is one of the larger releases in recent memory. Microsoft published patches for roughly 200 vulnerabilities including three actively exploited zero days, with critical remote code execution issues in core Windows infrastructure components and elevation of privilege bugs across the stack. If you handle patching for your fleet, this is your reading material before you start deploying.

https://www.pdq.com/blog/patch-tuesday-june-2026/

Tony Redmond on Finding Inactive User Accounts

Tony Redmond covers how to find inactive user accounts in Microsoft 365 tenants, with extra urgency given the Microsoft 365 license price increases coming into effect on July 1, 2026. He walks through two approaches: the Microsoft 365 Licensing Report for a quick view, and a PowerShell script that assesses inactivity based on sign in dates and refresh token baselines for more nuanced results. The point is that inactive accounts soak up licenses that suddenly cost more, and there has never been a better time to clean house.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/09/find-inactive-accounts/

Exchange Server SE Cumulative Update SU7 Available

Andres Bohren ran through Microsoft’s release of the SU7 update for Exchange Server Subscription Edition, including the post installation reboot requirement and his usual reminder to check for pending reboots before kicking off the installer. The KB number is 5094139 and the security update is available for direct download from Microsoft. For shops still running Exchange on premise or in a hybrid configuration, this is on the list of things to schedule for the next maintenance window.

https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/09/exchange-server-SE-SU7-has-been-released/

Andres Bohren Checks Azure VM Extension Versions

Andres Bohren circled back to his earlier Icewolf article on activating VM Automatic Extension Upgrade and added some practical guidance on checking the current extension version on running Azure VMs. The walkthrough uses PowerShell to inspect what version is deployed and confirms whether the automatic upgrade has run. Useful if you manage a fleet of Azure VMs and want to make sure they are not falling behind on agent and extension updates.

https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/08/check-azure-vm-extension-version/

Andrew Taylor’s Intune Newsletter Lands from Experts Live UK

Andrew Taylor published this week’s Intune Newsletter live from Experts Live UK in London, with content put together between trains, hotel rooms, and conference rooms. Highlights include a guide from Andrei Shchetkin on converting any Azure VM into a Windows 365 image using only Graph commands, and a script from T-Bone on modern drive and printer mapping for cloud native Windows with Intune and PowerShell. The full newsletter is worth your time if you manage endpoints.

https://andrewstaylor.com/2026/06/12/intune-newsletter-12th-june-2026/

PSConfEU Session Recordings

PSConfEU session recordings are starting to land on the SynEdgy YouTube channel following the conference wrap in Wiesbaden, and the 2026 lineup includes deep technical sessions from Steven Bucher on the state of the shell, Thorsten Butz on AI in PowerShell workflows, and Adam Driscoll on what is new in PowerShell Universal 2026.2. Sessions get uploaded over the coming weeks, so subscribing keeps you current.

Slides, scripts, and session materials from PSConfEU 2026 are collected at the conference GitHub repository, where speakers continue to drop their decks and demo code through June. This is the companion resource to the YouTube recordings.

https://github.com/psconfeu/2026

Upcoming Events

Experts Live UK wraps up today in London after two full days of sessions across Microsoft 365, Azure, AI, security, and the modern workplace. Recordings and recap content typically land in the weeks following the event from attendees and speakers, so keep an eye on the schedule page and social posts from the Intune and SCCM crowd.

https://eluk26.expertslive.co.uk/

The PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit returns to Bellevue, Washington in April 2027, the premier community event hosted by The DevOps Collective. Early bird registration usually opens late summer, so worth bookmarking now if you are planning ahead.

https://powershellsummit.org/

Looking further out, MMS Midway Edition heads to San Diego October 25 through 28, the smaller West Coast sibling of the main Midwest Management Summit.

https://mmsmoa.com/

Build returned outside Seattle for the first time since 2016, with Satya Nadella opening at Fort Mason on Tuesday morning to about 2,500 developers in the room. The framing this year was AI agents finally maturing from demo to deployment, and the announcement list reflects that shift. GitHub Copilot now has a native desktop app with agentic workflows in preview, Project Rayfin offers a managed backend on Microsoft Fabric using workflows defined in GitHub, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box puts one petaflop of compute and 128 gigabytes of unified memory on a developer’s desk for running 120 billion parameter models locally, and Microsoft introduced seven new MAI models including MAI-Thinking-1 for reasoning and MAI-Code-1 tuned for GitHub and VS Code. Foundry Local reached general availability, Azure AI Foundry can now route across models per task, Agent 365 expanded its enterprise governance footprint, and GPT-5.5 arrived with Tier 5 and 6 quota. A lot to digest.

https://build.microsoft.com/

PowerShell Conference Europe 2026 Wraps Up in Wiesbaden

The tenth edition of PSConfEU ran June 1 through June 4 at the Dorint Pallas Hotel in Wiesbaden, drawing more than 300 attendees, around 40 speakers, and roughly 70 sessions across four packed days. SynEdgy pulled off another solid year with deep technical content from the usual heavyweights, the return of PoshaKucha at twenty slides by twenty seconds each, and the Monday bike tour winding 30 kilometers along the Rhine to Eltville. Steven Bucher delivered three sessions including State of the Shell, Thorsten Butz took the stage with another fresh AI talk, and the broader Devolutions team showcased work on PowerShell Universal that included the first public demo of their AI integration since acquiring the platform. Ten years in, the community still feels like the heart of why this event matters.

https://psconf.eu/

Argument Completers, Dynamic Parameters, and More from Ben Reader at PSConfEU 2026

Ben Reader, the pipeline daddy at Patch My PC, walked through how to build better PowerShell functions in his PSConfEU 2026 session, framed around a database access problem that he kept needing to extend across four revisions of the same script. He starts with the basics that most of us already use like validate set, validate range, and validate pattern, then moves into the more advanced ground of custom validate classes, registered argument completers, inline completers, dynamic parameters, and finally his preferred approach of building completers as their own .NET classes that the function parameter references through a clean attribute. The walkthrough is the kind of thing you can drop right into your next module, and the recording landed alongside the rest of the PSConfEU 2026 sessions this week.

Devolutions Brings AI to PowerShell Universal at PSConfEU

Adam Driscoll took the stage at PSConfEU to walk through what has shipped in PowerShell Universal since the Devolutions acquisition, and the headline was the first public demonstration of AI capabilities integrated into the platform. Marc-André Moreau followed with a separate session on implementing PSRemoting at Devolutions covering PowerShell SDK limitations, WinRM quirks, TrustedHosts behavior, and the practical realities of NTLM and Kerberos authentication in production software. The booth ran live demos throughout the conference, and if you missed Adam’s session in person it should land in the public recording archive in the coming weeks.

https://devolutions.net/blog/devolutions-at-psconf-eu-2026-unveiling-ai-in-powershell-universal-in-wiesbaden/

Foundry Local Reaches General Availability at Build

Among the busy slate of Build announcements, Foundry Local stepping into general availability stood out for anyone running model inference closer to the user. The runtime now ships as a supported product rather than a preview, and pairs naturally with the new Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for developers who want to actually run models that previously had to live in the cloud. Together with the seven new MAI models and Azure AI Foundry’s new ability to route across models, the story Microsoft is telling is one of choice across local and cloud and across providers, which is a welcome shift.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/microsoft-build-2026

Tony Redmond on Container Management Labels for Security Groups

Tony Redmond walks through Microsoft’s new preview that brings container management labels to Entra ID security groups. The scope is currently narrow with just one control available, the AllowToAddGuests setting that determines whether guest accounts can be members. Tony makes the case that even this single lever is meaningful because guest access to sensitive security groups has long been a quiet risk that nobody had a clean way to prevent.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/03/security-groups-labels/

Tracking Distribution List Changes with PowerShell

A reader question about reporting distribution list changes prompted Tony Redmond to walk through how to do it properly given that distribution lists are Exchange Online objects rather than Entra ID groups. The same general PowerShell structure used for Microsoft 365 group change reporting applies, but the audit records and the actual code look quite different. Worth a read if you have ever opened a ticket asking who removed a manager from a critical list.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/02/distribution-list-changes/

MicrosoftPlaces PowerShell Module Hits 2.1.9

Andres Bohren posted at Icewolf about Microsoft pushing version 2.1.9 of the MicrosoftPlaces PowerShell module to the gallery. The release notes are thin since 2.1.8, but the headline is that the Object reference not set to an instance of an Object error that plagued 2.1.7 and 2.1.8 has been fixed. If you skipped the last two releases for that reason, this is the version to install.

https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/06/02/microsoftplaces-powershell-module-2-1-9-has-been-released/

What’s New in Microsoft Entra June 2026

The Entra team published their June roundup with a handful of items that admins will want to track. Passkey policies now get their own dedicated 20 kilobyte allocation in the authentication methods policy rather than sharing a single bucket with everything else, and the maximum number of passkey profiles per tenant goes from three to ten. There is also a reminder that the MFA enforcement for passwordless credential registration completes rollout by July 13, 2026, so if you have not finished your conditional access work for that, the clock is real.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft-entra-blog/whats-new-in-microsoft-entra-june-2026/4517885

Handling Loop Workspaces for Departed Users

Tony Redmond covers Microsoft finally rolling out a workflow to deal with personal Loop workspaces left behind when employees leave a tenant. The process is unfortunately manual with limited automation possible, but at least the framework now exists to review and preserve workspace content rather than losing it. Two years from announcement to rollout is not fast, but it is finally here.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/04/user-owned-loop-workspaces/

Office 365 for IT Pros June 2026 Update and 2027 Plans

The 132nd monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is now available for subscribers, and Tony Redmond used the post to share what is coming for the 2027 edition. The book is being renamed, a new chapter on Copilot and agents is being added, and two topics are being split out into their own books covering Microsoft Purview and the Power Platform. If you have been wondering when the ecosystem would finally outgrow a single volume, the answer is now.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/01/office-365-for-it-pros-132/

Upcoming Events

Experts Live UK (formerly Workplace Ninjas UK, rebranded for 2026) June 11-12, 2026 at CodeNode, London. That’s next week, not late summer.

https://eluk26.expertslive.co.uk/

MMS Midway Edition 2026 October 25-28, 2026 in San Diego. That’s fall, not late summer.

https://mmsmoa.com/

https://patchmypc.com/events/mms-2026-midway-edition/

Microsoft shipped PowerShell 7.7.0-preview.2 this week, and Tony Schultz over at the Icewolf blog flagged the change that matters most for anyone managing PowerShell on Windows at scale. Starting with 7.7-preview, there is no more MSI installer. The MSIX package becomes the primary install method on Windows, MSI continues for 7.6 but not future releases. Tony walks through running the new preview without and with the M365PSProfile module from his download of the ZIP. If you push PowerShell with Intune, ConfigMgr, or your own deployment plumbing, your packaging for 7.7 and beyond needs a rethink before this hits stable.

https://blog.icewolf.ch/archive/2026/05/28/powershell-v7-7-0-preview2-has-been-released/

Built In PowerShell Parameters You Should Be Using with Lucas Allman

Andrew Pla hosted Lucas Allman for a PowerShell Wednesday on the common parameters baked into every advanced function and cmdlet. Lucas walks through what an advanced function actually is, how CmdletBinding or a decorated parameter unlocks the full set, and why the six output streams exist as separate channels for success, error, warning, verbose, debug, and information. He also covers the action parameters and preference variables that change how your code reacts to traffic on those streams, including capturing stream output to a variable using InformationVariable. Part one of two. Lucas comes back next week for the more interesting ones including WhatIf and Confirm.

Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance: Find Configuration Drift

Microsoft Mechanics published a deep walkthrough this week on capturing your tenant configuration as code across more than 200 resource types spanning Entra, Intune, Exchange Online, Teams, Defender, and Purview, then turning that snapshot into an ongoing drift monitor. If you have ever wished you could diff your tenant the way you diff source control, this is exactly that workflow. The angle that should land hardest for our crowd is treating configuration as a versioned artifact, which finally gives PowerShell-driven environments a story for change management that does not depend on screenshots and prayer.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftmechanicsblog/microsoft-entra-tenant-governance--find-configuration-drift/4523358

Useful PowerShell Scripts for Windows Admin Tasks

Andrew Pla at PDQ dropped a ten-script toolkit this week aimed at the practical endpoint questions you actually field every day, like which critical errors showed up in event logs, which scheduled tasks look suspicious, are certificates valid, is BitLocker enabled, what shape are the batteries in, what is mapped where, what browser and VS Code extensions are installed, do my config baselines hold, is Defender healthy, and is Secure Boot ready for the UEFI 2023 certificate changes. The scheduled task auditor is the standout for me. It flags hidden tasks, encoded commands, execution policy bypasses, user writable paths, web downloads, and known LOLBins in one pass. Worth lifting straight into your PowerShell Scanner library.

https://www.pdq.com/blog/useful-powershell-scripts-for-windows-admin-tasks/

Jeff Hicks Ships PSIntro, a Welcome Screen and Tutorial Set for PowerShell Beginners

Jeff Hicks built PSIntro, an educational module that grew out of conversations with Jason Helmick about giving brand new users a friendlier front door into PowerShell. It puts a splash style welcome screen in front of beginners when they start a session, complete with clickable links in Windows Terminal, and it ships a set of short interactive tutorials on core concepts like Get-Command, with live output pulled from the user’s own session so the lesson matches their real environment. There are also helper commands for the things beginners stumble on early, like checking whether key modules need updating with Get-ModuleStatus, reporting on where profile scripts live, and creating one with New-PSProfile. It runs on both Windows PowerShell and PowerShell 7 across Windows, Linux, and macOS, and it is localized for English, French, and German. If you mentor anyone just getting started, or you run a user group with newcomers, this is a thoughtful thing to point them at.

https://github.com/jdhitsolutions/PSIntro

Automate Platform SSO Setup During macOS Enrollment

Cindy Crane on the Microsoft Entra Blog has a nice walkthrough this week on automating Platform SSO setup as part of macOS enrollment in Intune. The shape of the win is the usual modern endpoint story, less user friction during onboarding and fewer of those tickets that are really just a confused first sign in. If you are pulling Mac users into a Microsoft first stack, this is the cleanest path to a single sign in experience that I have seen documented end to end.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/category/microsoft-entra/blog/microsoft-entra-blog

Harm Veenstra on the PSBoundParameters vs IsPresent Question

Harm Veenstra dropped a fresh post this morning that started from a conversation with a colleague over which approach is right for checking whether a switch or parameter was actually used in a script or function. He breaks down what each does, PSBoundParameters being the automatic hashtable that fills in with whatever parameter names and values were passed on the command line, IsPresent being the simpler true or false check on a switch. The walkthrough uses his own Update-Modules function as the example and shows the same Install-PSResource call written both ways so you can see them next to each other. The honest answer to which is better is the IT classic of it depends, but Harm makes the practical case for IsPresent on plain switch logic and PSBoundParameters when you want the full picture of what the caller actually specified, with the caveat that defaults set inline never show up in the hashtable. He also signed off with a tease that next week’s post will be his PSConfEU recap.

https://powershellisfun.com/2026/05/29/using-psboundparameters-or-ispresent-when-checking-powershell-switch-or-parameters-usage/

Daniel Bradley Publishes 1,400 Plus Microsoft Architecture Icons at msicons.com

Daniel Bradley collated more than 1,400 Microsoft architecture icons and put them all in one easy to search spot at msicons.com. For every icon you can grab the scalable SVG, pull a PNG at whatever size you need, or embed it straight into a website or markdown file, and you can flip between light, dark, and transparent backgrounds depending on where it is headed. There is a compare view for putting icons side by side and a favoriting feature so you can bulk download a whole set at once. I am flagging this one specifically because if you build visual PowerShell apps with something like WPF, WinForms, or a web front end, having a consistent and official looking icon set on hand makes a real difference for style consistency, and this is the cleanest place I have seen to pull them.

https://msicons.com/

Solving Problems at the Root with Mark Littlefield. The PowerShell Podcast E230

Sending a Welcome Message to New Employees Part 2

Tony Redmond is back with a follow up to his welcome email project, and this one is the PowerShell heavy half. Instead of attaching ICS files, this version uses Get-MgUserCalendarView and Update-MgUserEvent in the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to find existing corporate calendar events, then quietly add new employees to the participant list so the meetings land on their calendars automatically. It is a cleaner pattern than building ICS bytes by hand, and the code is small enough to drop into an existing onboarding runbook without much surgery.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/05/27/new-employee-email2/

Reporting Usage Patterns for Room Mailboxes

Also from Tony this week, a practical look at finding out whether your room mailboxes are actually being used. The article weighs two paths, the classic Exchange Online PowerShell module versus the newer Graph Places API, and is honest about the permissions and ongoing run mechanics each one demands. The right answer probably depends on what else lives in your reporting pipeline, but the side-by-side here is exactly the comparison you want before you commit to one approach for a recurring report.

https://office365itpros.com/2026/05/26/room-mailboxes-usage/

What’s New in Microsoft Intune, May 2026

Scott Sawyer’s monthly Intune roundup updated this week with the May changes worth knowing, focused on Android, macOS, and certificate management refinements across the service. It is the post I always tell our team to read first when they want to know what changed without grinding through the message center one card at a time. If you are responsible for the Intune side of an environment, this is the cheapest five minutes you will spend on staying current.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftintuneblog/what%E2%80%99s-new-in-microsoft-intune-%E2%80%93-may/4491984

Midwest Management Summit 2026

Kevin Levart shared his recap of MMS, and if you have somehow never made it, this is one of the most respected systems and endpoint management conferences in the country. The Mall of America edition wrapped up earlier this month in Bloomington, Minnesota, with the deep ConfigMgr, Intune, Azure, and PowerShell sessions it is known for, the attendance cap that keeps it small and personal, and the community energy regulars will not stop talking about. If you missed this one, the second 2026 edition heads to the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego later in the year, so there is still a chance to get your MMS fix in 2026.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/midwest-management-summit-2026-kevin-levart-yq36c/

I Let Claude Take FULL Control of a Fresh Windows 11 PC (Debloat + Setup)

Memory gave Claude Code one prompt to set up a fresh Windows 11 install and let it run the PowerShell commands itself to remove bloat, install his apps, and lock down privacy in a VM. Cool watch and interesting concept; honestly the future of some development and testing.

Events

Microsoft Build 2026

Microsoft’s flagship developer conference runs June 2 to 3 this year, moving to San Francisco and online after its long run in Seattle. The focus is squarely on building and scaling AI, with the product teams going deep on real code and real systems. If you cannot make the trip, the online option is free and worth blocking off given how much of the year’s Azure, Microsoft 365, and developer tooling news tends to land at Build.

https://build.microsoft.com/

PowerShell Conference Europe 2026

The big one is just around the corner, June 1 to 4 in Wiesbaden, Germany. Heads up that ticket prices already moved to 1,950 euros as of May 11 with the event entering its final logistics phase, so if you have been sitting on the fence, the cost only climbs from here.

https://psconf.eu/