MVP Awards 2019

Last year I found an amazing analysis of the MVP award numbers. (See here) I hope he will publish this analysis this year again.

I’d like to save the numbers, so here we go:

Category	July 2018	July 2019
Development Technologies	780	644
Office Apps and Services	383	491
Azure	366	409
Data Platform	366	332
Cloud and DataCenter Management	302	232
Business Solutions	184	167
Windows Development	186	119
Enterprise Mobility	122	106
AI	?	84
Windows and Devices for IT	?	57
Office Development	?	47

So the two growing categories are Office Apps and Services and Azure.

(Data according to Patrick Guimonet and MVP Site)

Update: So there is a new site tracking MVP numbers. Have a look.

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Multiple Microsoft Accounts – suggestion

We discussed lately, that we have troubles using Microsoft Teams with multiple accounts. There is already a Uservoice filed on this.

But I also have a similar situation in Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Outlook (including additional email accounts), and Office applications that refer to various Onedrives.

So I’d like to store all these accounts on one place – preferably in the cloud. And it would be even great, to switch on and off accounts per device.

So now I’ve described my solution to this Szenario – now I’m looking for whom to tell.

Flatten PowerShell Arrays

Sometimes I have to flatten an PowerShell Array, since I have to have a String. How can we do this as easily as possible with PowerShell?

$a = @('Patrick','wants','a','String',';)')<br> $a -join ' '

You’ll get this output:

So it’s really easy to get a string from an Array.

PowerShell Profile

This week I have been at the PowerShell Usergroup in Munich, Germany.

They wished to get information about PowerShell Profiles, so I commited a talk on PowerShell Profile. And here is the content.

There are 4 PowerShell Profiles loaded on startup of the console. But there can be some more Profiles in your environment. That is, beacause you have two PowerShell profiles per PowerShell console. So VSCode, PowerShell ISE and the PowerShell command prompt have two profiles each. One Profile is for All Users, one for the current user. Additionally you have got a PowerShell Profile for Windows PowerShell and a seperate one for PowerShell Core. So there can be some PowerShell Profiles on your computer.

Use the following command in your prefered console to get the actual profile pathes:

1. $profile.AllUsersAllHosts
2. $profile.AllUsersCurrentHost
3. $profile.CurrentUserAllHosts
4. $profile.CurrentUserCurrentHost

By the way, they are loaded in exactly this order (which makes sense).

The 4 profiles you have in the running PowerShell ISE

What I have in my PSProfile

I talked about which PowerShell Profiles exists and also, what I have in my profile as an PowerShell automator. As an automator my focus is on execution duration, so the most relevant part is the execution time in the prompt. It looks like this in my console:

There are some more featues in my PSProfile prompt, eg the color of the provider is integrated in the path, for example FileSystem and registry:

You can find my Profile on Github.

PowerShell Profile Pathes

Here are some examples of profile pathes.

# PowerShell Core with VSCode
ProfilePathC:\Users\patrick\Documents\PowerShell\Microsoft.VSCode_profile.ps1

# Windows PowerShell with VSCode
ProfilePathC:\Users\patrick\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.VSCode_profile.ps1  

# Windows PowerShell ProfilePath with ISE
C:\Users\patri\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShellISE_profile.ps1

# Windosw PowerShell in the Console
C:\Users\patri\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

Scripting Guy – Understanding the six PowerShell Profiles (there could be more, as you already know) 

Some ideas how to use the PowerShell Profile in a bad way

My Profile on github

Grant access to Service Requests via AD Groups in User Roles

We grant access to Service Manager Serrvice Requests using AD Groups in User Roles. When a User is added to the AD Group the permissions are not updated – so they do not see the additional Service Request in the portal.

There are two things to do:

1. Recycle App Pool
2. User has to re-login (not always)

Here is the code to Recyle the App pool for the standard HTML Portal and the ITNetX Portal:

@('ItsmPortalv3Pool','SMSelfServicePortal_appPool') | % { Restart-WebAppPool $_} 

Link to Technet discussion

Azure Mobile App–some thoughts

Today I have been asked, what could be improved in the Azure Mobile App. Since I mainly use PowerShell, that is a bit of a challenge. In PowerShell there is no GUI – as you know. So I was thinking about ways to improve the Azure Mobile App.

I have multiple Azure AD and Live ID acounts – all can be managed in this app. And I see all subscriptions in each account. Very nice.

So my main purpose to look into the app are virtual machines. To look at the status and start or stop the machines.

So I figured out these three possibilities to improve the app:

Show all subscriptions in one list, not in Azure AD accounts

I would find it useful, to have all subscriptions in one list – not only all subscriptions for each AAD account. So I do not have to search for a Subscription in one of my accounts.

Favourites for all subscriptions

I would prefere, to have Favourites over all subscriptions – like the recent list in Office. In the recent list in Office there are all Documents of all Microsoft accounts together in one recent-list. So I do not have to change the account and the subscription, to get to the favourites. I simply have them.

This could be an additional feature. Favourites on subscription level AND Favourites for all subscriptions.

Make Favourites available in portal.azure.com

Make the Favourites available and editable in the web browser on the Azure portal.

So these are my current suggestions to the Azure Mobile App.

Error while Editing SCSM Template

Today I got a somewhat strange error message in System Center Service Manager, as I wanted to delete an Activity in an Service Request Template.

This ist the message:
Date: 12/12/2018 9:08:49 AM
Application:
Application Version: 7.5.7487.0
Severity: Error
Message: 
: Verification failed with 1 errors:
-------------------------------------------------------
Error 1:
Found error in 1|zmQ_ISERequests|1.0.0.0|Offering6eb4772697264d14a1d6c91b83def062/GeneratedId_PresentationMappingTemplate0/GeneratedId_Sources0/GeneratedId_Source2/GeneratedId_Targets0/GeneratedId_Target1|4|RequestOffering/PresentationMappingTemplate/Sources/Source/Targets/Target with message:
Invalid Presentation Mapping Template. The Path attribute must point to a valid object within the object template.
-------------------------------------------------------
: Invalid Presentation Mapping Template. The Path attribute must point to a valid object within the object template.

Solution

So first, the Template is used in a Service Request. And in the Service Request one Input “Query Result” was configured to be added to Activity I wanted to delete. As I changed this configuration to an other Activity the error has gone.