Christopher Kibble - My Technical and Personal Ramblings

Better PoSH: Using $PSDefaultParameterValues

Published by Chris Kibble on July 15, 2019

Today’s quick PoSH tip comes from a conversation I had with Kevin Crouch (@PsychoData) and Brett Miller (@BrettMiller_IT), and I got to learn about the $PSDefaultParameterValues variable, which I’d never used before.

Detecting Skype Activity with PowerShell

Published by Chris Kibble on July 11, 2019

I’m working on a project to get a number of drivers updated across an environment. One of the biggest problems is that if we update certain audio, video, or network drivers while the user is in a Skype call, the call will fail. Often in testing I found that reconnecting to the Skype call or …

Better PoSH: Avoid Using += for Arrays

Published by Chris Kibble on July 8, 2019

I’ve found myself hanging around some PowerShell chats lately, and I’ve been picking up on a lot of neat tricks to write better code. This one comes my way via Adam Cook from his blog post on his awesome new function Get-CMUnusedSources (seriously, if you’re a ConfigMgr shop, check it out).

Updating Microsoft Docs using GitHub and Git Bash

Published by Chris Kibble on July 2, 2019

In the six minute video below, I’m going to walk you through the process of forking a Microsoft Docs repository from GitHub, cloning it to your local machine, making changes, pushing those changes back into your repository, and finally creating a pull request with Microsoft to prompt them to bring your changed content into the …

Inventory Java with Configuration Manager

Published by Chris Kibble on May 8, 2019

Short and sweet for those at MMS 2019 who were looking to inventory java usage with Configuration Manager. There is a 2018 System Center Dudes post on metering java. The post was based on a CI created by Steve Jesok of TCSMUG back in 2015. The original script doesn’t account for problems with newer versions …