RunAs Radio

The return of Two Grumpy Old Men Complain about Windows! Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about a year of Windows 11 - the good, the bad, and the meh. Paul talks about the bits of Windows 10X that became Windows 11 and how simplifications in Win11 may annoy power users but are beneficial to regular folks. But nobody benefits from the ads on the desktop - except Microsoft. The conversation turns to the hardware side of the world and the soon-to-be-announced ARM-based Windows laptop. After all, there are already ARM servers in Azure, so when do we get a new generation of great workstations?Links:ThurrottRecorded September 8, 2022

How can Viva Learning improve your team's productivity? Richard chats with Ulrika Hedlund about how the latest generation of tools from Microsoft helps measure productivity and focus on learning opportunities. The M365 platform can show where employees struggle with tools that lead to learning opportunities - and then measure the results! Ulrika talks about the various kinds of learning needed within an organization, including compulsory learnings for regulated industries, standard corporate training, and then moving more into productivity and industry-focused knowledge. Viva Learning and the related tools make it easier than ever to build custom learning materials that can make learning more specific to your company and fun as well!Links:Microsoft Productivity ScoreLinkedIn LearningViva LearningLearning API for Viva LearningRecorded August 9, 2022

How do you make manageable Infrastructure-as-Code? Richard talks to Joe Duffy about his open-source project called Pulumi, helping you build Infrastructure-as-Code solutions in almost any language for virtually any cloud platform or service. Joe talks about how infrastructure folks are headed down a similar path to developers from a few years ago, needing better source control, testing, and tooling for their infrastructure. And these are solved problems in the development space. By taking advantage of developer tooling, you can make Infrastructure-as-Code that is reusable and modular so that you can solve complicated problems like security implementations once. Then, when changes need to happen, they're made in one place and easy to propagate to all your projects.Links:PulumiVSCodeRecorded September 6, 2022

What can GitHub do for your PowerShell scripts? Richard talks to Barbara Forbes about using GitHub and PowerShell together. Barbara first discusses the fundamentals - using GitHub as your source code repository for PowerShell. It takes some time to learn, but you can start just using it for yourself. Things get more complex when multiple people start to work on the scripts, but they also get better. Then the conversation turns to the fun stuff - using Github Copilot to help you write your scripts, incorporating GitHub Actions to automate testing and deployment. PowerShell code is code and should have all the protections and power tools that GitHub provides!Links:PowerShell on GitHubVisual Studio CodeGitHub SkillsGitHub FlowGitHub CopilotGitHub ActionsPesterPSProfilerBarbara's BlogRecorded August 3, 2022

What can a sysadmin learn from a developer? Richard chats with Rick Taylor about his experiences learning from developers to write better code - sysadmin code, of course, like PowerShell, Python, and even YAML. Rick talks about how PowerShell code works across all the clouds and how organizations need well-managed PowerShell the same way developers create well-managed compiled code. The conversation explores the various developer techniques that can help sysadmins be more productive - call it DevOps if you like, but it mostly looks like getting work done!Links:PowerShell for GCPPowerShell for AWSPowerShell for AzureAzure DevOpsGitHubRecorded August 9, 2022

Can you use artificial intelligence technologies in data analytics? Richard chats with Priscilla Camp about using cognitive services in PowerBI for image recognition, natural language processing, and even sentiment analysis. Priscilla describes her experience doing analysis on data from the Universal Studio theme parks in Orlando, going beyond simple happy/neutral/sad ranking into analyzing the thousands of comments made by folks in the park. Through sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction, those comments can be turned into actions the park can take to improve people's experiences - and potentially increase revenues!Links:Azure Data FactoryAzure Synapse AnalyticsPowerBICognitive Services in PowerBIAzure Cognitive ServicesKey Phrase ExtractionKaggleLearning Cognitive ServicesRecorded August 5, 2022

How do you learn PowerShell effectively? Richard chats with Jeff Hicks about his experiences teaching PowerShell from the beginning. Jeff talks about strategies to learn more about PowerShell as you code, not just searching for cut-and-paste examples. The danger of cut-and-paste is that you don't get a chance to understand what you're working on - you need to write some code to get better. This line of reasoning turns the conversation to routine learning, ensuring you're writing a little PowerShell daily to grow your skills - whether that's code you need in your work or more practice-related code. PowerShell is a superpower. You just need to learn it!Links:PowerShellVMware PowerCLIPowerShell.orgPowerShell on DiscordPowerShell Practice PrimerBehind the PowerShell PipelineJeff's BlogRecorded July 26, 2022

PowerApps are proliferating - how do you keep them under control? Richard talks to April Dunnam about managed environments for PowerApps, providing oversight and governance. April talks about the Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit as a way to get started in the governance model with tooling for insights, auditing, compliance, and even helping connect the folks building PowerApps in your organization. It's early days for the tooling, but worth the effort to help get PowerApps to be part of the same application lifecycle management processes that already exist in your organization!Links:Managed EnvironmentsMicrosoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter KitExpress DesignPower Platform Extension for VS CodeRecorded July 15, 2022

On July 8, the Rogers company in Canada had a total network outage for 15 hours - what happened? Richard talks to Dana Epp about what we can learn from an outage like this. Dana talks about having an open root cause analysis to provide detailed discussion without accusation or blame. You understand the potential when you look at how the airline industry has become incredibly safe through open root cause analysis. Outages are bad - but learning from them is what makes up better!Links:Microsoft Defender for EndpointRogers Outage Press ReleaseCloudflare View of Rogers OutageCSE Russia cyber threatRecorded July 15, 2022

Viva continues to evolve - what's the latest? Richard talks to Sandy Ussia about her work with the various Viva modules and approaches to customizing Teams. Sandy talks about how it's possible to shape a Teams experience to fit your organization, including using third-party components - there are many choices! When your Teams is in good shape, there are plenty of new Viva modules to explore, including Topics, a knowledge management system using machine learning to extract critical aspects of your organization. And related to that machine learning module are upcoming Sales and Goals! The Viva family keeps growing!Links:Accessible PowerAppsLightning ToolsMicrosoft VivaViva ConnectionsSharePoint NewsAdaptive CardsMicrosoft Viva TopicsOffice DelveMicrosoft Viva SalesMicrosoft Viva GoalsRecorded July 15, 2022