Two free live trainings from MVA on Desired State Configuration !

This week Microsoft Virtual Academy (also knows as MVA) will host two great live training events, one tomorrow and another one after tomorrow on Desired State Configuration.

If you are not familiar with MVA, It provides free online IT training & learning of Windows, Microsoft Technologies through courses designed by industry experts.

I did not play much with this new feature but I plan to invest more time into it in the next few weeks, this is definitely the future of system configuration management. If you are like me the two following events are a great way to start!

UPDATE: Videos are now available, see links below

What is Desired State Configuration ?

DSC is a new management platform in Windows PowerShell that enables deploying and managing configuration data for software services and managing the environment in which these services run.

DSC provides a set of Windows PowerShell language extensions, new Windows PowerShell cmdlets, and resources that you can use to declaratively specify how you want your software environment to be configured. It also provides a means to maintain and manage existing configurations.
Source: Technet

Introducing WinFormPS: PowerShell module to interact with WinForms controls

I started to work on a PowerShell module called WinFormPS.
This module contains a few functions that let you interact with Windows Form controls such as DataGridView, ListBox or Button controls for example.

To build those forms I mostly use PowerShell Studio from Sapien but this can also work with any simple Form created from scratch.

The motivation to create User Interfaces has always been to ease the work of  departments and teams with some of their heavy tasks, or simply to speed up some very repetitive processes. I definitely don't have a developer background, so please bear with me and feel free to critique or push update to the module on GitHub :-)

WinForms
Windows Forms (WinForms) is the name given to a graphical (GUI) class library included as a part of Microsoft .NET Framework, providing a platform to write rich client applications for desktop, laptop, and tablet. While it is seen as a replacement for the earlier and more complex C++ based Microsoft Foundation Class Library, it does not offer a comparable paradigm and only act as a platform for the user interface tier in a multi-tier solution. -Wikipedia

PowerShell Studio 2014/2015 - Editor Preset : Dark theme

Today a quick post to share one of the editor preset I created for Sapien PowerShell Studio.

Because I prefer to work with a dark theme, when installing PowerShell Studio, one of the first thing I do is to set my layout to Editor Only and put a Dark theme like the "Visual Studio 2013 Dark".

On the editor side, the tool come with a couple of preset but none of them are dark/black.
So I created my own...

Update: Adding details on how to change the PowerShell Studio theme and link to Anonymous Pro font

Download from GitHub
https://github.com/lazywinadmin/PowerShell/tree/master/_PowerShellStudio/EditorPresets