Supercharging Graph Data Retrieval and Sending Mail with Graph
Also, a bit of news about the newsletter name change...
Hello, fellow PowerShell Engineers! It’s now PowerShell Engineer #20, and I think it’s time to say goodbye to the PowerShell Tip. I was actually really inspired by Tony Redmond’s take on AI in IT content during his appearance on Entra Chat by Merril Fernando, a Product Manager at Microsoft. (Which, by the way - subscribe to Entra.News and check out Entra Chat - the newsletter and podcast are great!)
Tony made an excellent point about a lot of people making duplicate content off of Microsoft documentation and re-publishing, which was that this really is not adding value in the ecosystem of content good content that is actually valuable for managers, engineers, and technicians out in the world. There has been an overall decline of good, quality technical content. The rise of AI generated content and summaries has lead to a lack of incentive for content creators because there is so much noise. Moreover, you have LLMs just hoovering up what good content there still us while it’s being created. I really do agree that this will be a long term detriment to the PowerShell community, the IT community, and who knows how many other communities.
All of that said, I have a major announcement and that the PowerShell Engineer newsletter is being renamed to PowerShell.News (and is available at both PowerShell.news and PowerShellNews.com). My YouTube channel will remain as PowerShell Engineer. I feel this better aligns with the mission of the newsletter, which is to facilitate the connections and knowledge sharing of the global PowerShell community. Thank you all for your continued support!
PowerShell Community News
A Dive into AutomatedLab - Infrastructure as Code for PowerShellers
Jake Hildreth wrote a cool article about AutomatedLab, a tool that helps Windows computer experts quickly set up fake computer networks (that he calls labs) using simple instructions, instead of having to click around and do everything by hand. Evidently the famed Locksmith module was made on a homelab that is now decommissioned by Jake’s colleague, which prompted his exploration of the AutomatedLab tool (repo here).
Send Mail with Attachment via Microsoft Graph
Andres Bohren has a good article on sending emails with attachments using the Microsoft Graph API and PowerShell, including steps for Entra Application setup, permissions, and using application access policies. This guide looks super helpful for anyone automating email sending with Graph and PowerShell.
Supercharge Microsoft Graph API Data Retrieval with PowerShell Batch Requests
Jorge Suarez has a great article on how to make getting data from Microsoft Graph super fast using a special trick called "batch requests" in PowerShell, which basically means asking for a bunch of things at once instead of one by one. This is awesome because it can cut down on those annoying long waits when you're pulling a lot of info. I love that he has an actual benchmarked results table that shows the speed improvements with his solution.
Creating HTML Reports with PowerShell
Jeff Hicks has an interesting article, the first in a series, on how to get started creating HTML reports using PowerShell, covering planning, data selection, and the basic ConvertTo-Html cmdlet. It's a pretty solid primer for anyone looking to make their PowerShell output look a bit snazzier. Browse the archive to check out all of the posts and give Jeff a sub if you haven’t already.
PowerShell Videos
State of the Shell at PSConfEu - a great video with Steven Bucher and the PowerShell team themselves about the state of PowerShell.
In this episode of the PowerShell Podcast with Andrew Pla, Microsoft's Miriam Wiesner discusses her journey in security research, including insights on Just Enough Administration (JEA) and MFA bypass techniques.
A little video from myself about the newsletter name change that I made in one of the parks of my hometown.