How does a PowerApp become a fully-fledged software application? Richard chats with Luise Freese about her experience of taking a PowerApp built by an individual through the "onboarding process" of becoming a complete software application, including requirements, tests, deployment pipeline, security, user training, and more. It's easy to create a prototype of an application with PowerApps, but once you move beyond the basics, there's a significant amount of work that's essential to the long-term health of the app. Luise discusses how often PowerApps utilizes "free" data sources, such as SharePoint lists, rather than the underlying datasets that require a license. This hinders performance and reliability; it's better to work with the right APIs and data sources. It's also an accomplishment, as what started as an individual's automation is now a part of the suite of applications that a company depends on!

Links

• Power Apps and Power Automate
• Luise's Blog Post
• Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit
• Entra ID for Power Apps

Recorded June 27, 2025

How has Azure been innovating lately? While at Build Richard chatted with Azure CTO Mark Russinovich about some of the latest innovations in Azure, including some of the new hardware available. Mark talks about working with hardware manufacturers to build servers optimized to the workloads the largest Azure customers need. The conversation also explores the new innovations in AI and how Azure is being optimized to serve those workloads - and be shaped by them! Mark also talks about how material science is evolving with generative AI technologies leading to a discussion about the coming role of quantum computing - and how that will live in the cloud as well!

Links

• Scott and Mark Learn to...
• Azure F-Family VMs
• Hollow Core Fiber
• Majorana 1 Quantum Processor

Recorded May 20, 2025

How do you get more from GitHub in your work routine? Richard chats with April Yoho about how sysadmins can take advantage of more GitHub features to make better quality scripts and more! April discusses the capabilities of GitHub Copilot to assist administrators in comprehending the intricacies of source management, including branching and merging. The conversation also delves into extracting more from Copilot itself, including custom instructions and the new agentic mode. Now you can use Copilot to describe a new script and turn it into a series of GitHub issues - and those issues can be assigned to an agentic AI to get the code written!

Links

• SPACE Framework
• Custom Instructions for GitHub Copilot
• Resolving Merge Conflicts
• Agent Mode in VS Code

Recorded May 20, 2025

Here comes SQL Server 2025! While at Build, Richard chatted with Bob Ward about releasing a preview version of SQL Server 2025. Bob discusses SQL Server 2025 as an AI-ready enterprise database with numerous capabilities specifically tailored to your organization's AI needs, including a new vector data type. This includes making REST API calls to Azure OpenAI, Ollama, or OpenAI. This is also the version of SQL Server designed to integrate with Microsoft Fabric through mirroring. There are many more features, even a new icon!

Links

• SQL Server 2025 Announcement
• JSON Data Type
• Ollama

Recorded May 20, 2025

How can modern telemetry solutions help you? While at NDC in Melbourne, Richard chatted with Liz Fong-Jones of Honeycomb about her approach to educating leadership on creating great telemetry solutions for organizations. Liz discusses the importance of being able to answer questions about reliability issues without causing problems, as opposed to relying on a dashboard for every measurement taken of the system. The conversation also delves into the culture of building reliability, where people are encouraged to fail and learn, rather than being punished when things go wrong.

Links

• Honeycomb

Recorded April 30, 2025

Why would a security vulnerability take more than two years to fix? Richard chats with Steve Syfuhs about the evolution of the response to KB5015754. Originally published in 2022, the issue involved vulnerabilities in the on-premises certificate authority for Active Directory. Pushing a fix to force the immediate replacement of the certificates could have left users unable to log into Active Directory entirely. Steve explains how the gradual rollout of the fix allowed folks concerned (and paying attention!) to fix it immediately. At the same time, for everyone else, the fix happened as the existing certificates expired. But not every scenario is automatic - some require sysadmin intervention. So, how do you get their attention? The story leads to the February 11, 2025 update that could knock some users off Active Directory, but had an easy and quick fix. The final phase should be September 2025; hopefully, the last stragglers will be ready!

Links

• KB5014754
• Microsoft Security Response Center
• Create and Assign SCEP Certificate Profiles in Intune

Recorded April 10, 2025

How do you talk to security? While at NDC Melbourne, Richard chatted with Sarah Young about her approaches to helping folks work with the security team. Often seen as an impediment to business, Sarah talks about what motivates security teams, how to use language to help them understand that you are taking security seriously, and how to get more things done! Ultimately, the DevOps mantra of providing value to the customer still works - working with people to improve the processes that lead to secure systems helps everyone!

Links

• Daniel Pink's Drive
• Managed Identities for Azure
• Tenerife Airport Disaster

Recorded April 30, 2025

What's new in PowerShell 7.5? Richard talks to Jason Helmick about the latest version of PowerShell. Jason talks about 7.5 being a version with plenty of community contributions and what that means for everyone. He also discusses 7.6, which will be released as a long-term support version of PowerShell synchronized with .NET 10. Then, on to Desired State Configuration 3.0.0, which makes DSC work effectively across platforms, with or without PowerShell itself! 7.5 is a great version - are you up to date?

Links

• PowerShell 7.5
• PowerShell on GitHub
• Desired State Configuration 3.0.0
• WinGet Configuration
• System Configuration Tools in Windows

Recorded April 4, 2025

Active Directory is 25 years old - are you still managing it like it's 1999? Richard talks to Liz Tesch about her excellent blog post on the subject and the challenge many sysadmins have with Active Directory today. Liz talks about how WAN bandwidth was a concern in the early 2000s, so we organized Active Directory into Organizational Units to minimize the amount of AD traffic over the WAN - today, that is irrelevant. The challenge today is ensuring AD is not a vector for blackhats to attack the organization. Raising your functional level and utilizing some great free tools (check the links in the show notes) are all you need to use Active Directory like it's 2025!

Links

• Active Directory is 25 Years Old. Do you still manage it like it's 1999?
• mimikatz
• Windows Local Administrator Password Solution
• Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management
• Kara Lawson - Handle Hard Better
• Endpoint Detection and Response

Recorded April 4, 2025

How do you make a career in cybersecurity? Richard talks to Yuri Diogenes about his work in cybersecurity, including his book on building a career in cybersecurity. Yuri talks about the inquisitive mindset that works well in cybersecurity - wanting to understand why things happen and get to the root cause. The conversation also explores the value of experimentation and practical experience as well as certifications and training - they all have value. However, it is also recognized that cybersecurity encompasses a vast area of work - it's not one kind of job, so you have a lot of choices to make!

Links

• Building a Career in Cybersecurity

Recorded March 14, 2025