Planet PowerShell

Planet PowerShell Announcement - Enforcing HTTPS

June 11, 2018 by Kieran Jacobsen in powershell

Planet PowerShell has grown over the last 18 months since its launch. The community has grown to over 60 talented individuals, with great content posted every day. During this time, I've been very cautious of making many significant changes, but this is about to change.

I've been working on some plans to improve Planet PowerShell and will be sharing the roadmap in the next few weeks. I wanted to make the first announcement early as it may require work from the content authors. I want to be sure that everyone is aware of this change.

From the 1st of August 2018, Planet PowerShell will only support aggregating blogs that support HTTPS. Not only that, but we will also validate the certificates presented. Any blogs that don't support HTTPS with a valid certificate will be removed from Planet PowerShell.

Why am I making this change? Simply, I'm making this change to make the world a safer place. There are many great reasons for making the switch:

Protecting people’s privacy
The browsers are starting to mark HTTP as insecure
HTTPS gets better rankings in search engines
HTTP 2 provides significant performance benefits.

I really can’t find a reason not support HTTPS on your blog. Getting a certificate is extremely easy and there are free options available. You can get a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt, put your blog behind CloudFlare for free or if you're a Microsoft MVP, DigiCert can issue one to you. If you're using GitHub pages, you can find extra guidance at Troubleshooting custom domains.

This gives everyone over 6 ½ weeks to prepare for this change. I've already gone through and identified blogs who are currently using HTTP but support HTTPS, I'll merge update for these shortly.

Currently are around 10 blogs that don’t support HTTPS, or have invalid certificates. I've created an Issue on GitHub to track this change and will include everyone whose blog doesn’t support HTTPS there.

GitHub Issue Templates and Plaster

June 10, 2018 by Kieran Jacobsen in Coding, powershell

GitHub recently announced new features and support for multiple issue templates. Before, GitHub supported a single template, by supporting multiple types of issues, we can gather the right information from the beginning.

When we create multiple issue templates, users will be prompted to specify the type of issue they want to create. We can target specific questions or information requests for specific types of issues.

GitHub provides two pre-created templates, bug report and feature request. These pre-created templates suit most situations. Bug report issues can focus on reproduction, expected behavior and other troubleshooting information. Feature request templates can focus on understanding the what, how and why a new feature is required. You can also create your own templates for other situations, you don’t have to use what GitHub provides.

I've updated my Plaster template for PowerShell modules to contain a bug report and feature request template. I modified GitHub’s template to ask for things like: • PowerShell transcripts. • Operating System and PowerShell versions. • A list of any other modules that might imported.

You can create templates via the GitHub interface, or simply include them in the ISSUE_TEMPLATE folder in your repository. You can also create the templates yourself. You need to include the name and a description for each template. Much like this:

---
name: Bug report
about: Create a report to help us improve

---

So, what do the new templates look like for a user? If you select Issues > New Issue, you can now select what kind of issue you'd like to raise. In the case in the image, we can choose bug report or feature request. Users can opt for “Open a regular issue”, in this case GitHub will use ISSUE_TEMPLATE.MD.

You can also define multiple pull request templates in the same manner. Simply put each template into the PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE folder. The experience is like creating an Issue. I'm creating different pull request templates for Planet PowerShell, so we can correctly track changes.

If you want to start using these templates as part of your Plaster templates, you can see my examples over at my Plaster template.

Presentation: Secure Azure Deployment Patterns

June 04, 2018 by Kieran Jacobsen in Presentations, Azure, Architecture

It was a wonderful experience to present at the Azure Global Bootcamp in Melbourne this year. This year I spoke about possible methods or patterns for securing Azure resources. This is an extremely board topic, though I focused on App Services, Virtual Network Endpoints and ARM templates.

You can find the PowerPoint slides to download here or view them via SlideShare.

Secure Azure Deployment Patterns from kieranjacobsen

Posh-SYSLOG 3.3 has been released

May 13, 2018 by Kieran Jacobsen in powershell, Coding

Several days ago, Jared raised a Pull Request for Posh-SYSLOG to correct an issue with the module’s manifest. It seems that in version 3.0 of Posh-SYSLOG, I used the PowerShellHostVersion attribute of the module manifest and not PowerShellVersion to specify the minimum Powershell version. This wouldn't have created issues within a normal PowerShell session, but would have prevented the module from loading in VS Code (as Jared reported) or the ISE.

AzurePublicIPAddresses v1.0 has been released

May 06, 2018 by Kieran Jacobsen in Coding, powershell, Azure

I'm pleased to announce Version 1.0 of AzurePublicIPAddresses. This version includes support 6 new Azure regions:

Australia Central
Australia Central 2
UK North
UK South 2
North Europe 2 (name TBC)
East Europe (name TBC)

This release also represents a major milestone since the modules creation back in March 2016. The module has proven to be very stable, and hence I'm now giving it the stable 1.0 moniker. I'm confident that the existing design should support any new regions or source XML files that Microsoft may release without the need for breaking changes.