Bio
Thomas Rayner is a Senior Security Service Engineer at Microsoft. His background is in Cloud and Datacenter Management, specializing in DevOps, CI/CD, systems and process automation, public, private and hybrid cloud, and .NET coding - particularly PowerShell. Thomas is a prominent speaker, best-selling author, and instructor covering a vast array of IT topics. Thomas is very active within the technical community and a variety of Microsoft technical and strategic teams.
My Talks
A Crash Course in Writing Your Own PSScriptAnalyzer Rules
PSScriptAnalyzer is great. You use it to check all your code to make sure it follows PowerShell best practices, right? In this session, I'll show you how to take your PSScriptAnalyzer skills to the...
Basic To Baller: Customizing Your PowerShell Prompt
I'm one of those people who spends waaay too much time customizing my PowerShell prompt. It's a heck of a rabbit hole. Let me show you the cool stuff I've done to mine that people ask about every t...
Defense Against the Dark Arts for Muggles
You don't have to be a big name like Equifax or Capital One to be breached. Cyber crime is thriving, and the tools and systems you're responsible for can either be used to protect you, or they can ...
Getting Ahead By Deleting Code
In my career, I've written a net negative number of lines of PowerShell, and it's made me an invaluable part of my team at Microsoft. Optimizing and simplifying old code, and other people's code is...
Going Fishing with Superpowered Git Hooks
If all you do with Git is add, commit, push, and merge, then you're missing out on a world of functionality. There are so many opportunities to customize Git to increase productivity and automate C...
How To Start Taking Risks Without Getting Clawed In The Face
A lot of people use the term "risk adverse" as an excuse to never take any risks, ever, just because it's disruptive. Let me tell you why being "risk adverse" is actually exposing you to more probl...
Learning and Teaching PowerShell with PSKoans
Are you the only PowerShell scripter on your team? Or are you just getting started? No matter what your application is, the PSKoans module is an excellent teaching system that will get you, or a cl...
Regex For Complete Noobs
Regular expressions are sequences of characters that define a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, not as some people would have you believe, devil code written by witch...
Regex for Rockstars
You're not a regex noob. You know about quantifiers like ?, *, and +. You also know about tokens like \w, \s, and \d. It's time, now, to take your regex skills to the next level with some advanced ...
Writing Compiled PowerShell Cmdlets
Maybe you're not "a dev". You don't really know C#. Why would you want to write a compiled PowerShell cmdlet? Well, compiled cmdlets are necessary to play with other C# libraries/systems, and they'...
Writing Your First Visual Studio Code Extension
VS Code with the PowerShell extension is the de facto standard editor for PowerShell. One of the best things about VS Code is how customizable it is. Anybody can create themes and extensions for Co...