The past few companies I have worked at have used Skype for Business in one form or the other. Some for IM and others for telephony. It's a good communication tool but just like the consumer Skype version it really likes to start every time your PC powers on.

Normally when i'm in the middle of coding or looking busy my keyboard layout will randomly change. Meaning that declaring string variables becomes a right pain as the @ symbol and " quotes change places (UK QWERTY layout).

For the past couple of weeks I've noticed that the OSD volume control on all my Windows 10 computers are now massive and take up a good portion of the screen. However, that's not the worst part it seems to take around 5 seconds for the window to fade all while blocking windows behind it.

In most recent versions of Windows 10, PowerShell is the default console. If you open file explorer and shift + right click, you will get the option to Open a PowerShell window here (as below).

I have quite a few databases in Azure and use PowerShell from time to time to connect and execute queries on them. This is pretty straight forward and normally works as intended. However, sometimes I get the following exception:

Unable to load adalsql.dll (Authentication=ActiveDirectoryPassword). Error code: 0x2. For more information, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=513072

Occasionally I'll be running a script on my local machine that may take a few hours to complete. Sometimes i'll need to leave my desk and of course have to lock my machine.

So you've got some resource (rooms/equipment) calendars in Exchange that you need to make the calendars public for. You can use PowerShell to accomplish this quite easily.

Recently I needed to get a bunch of groups from Exchange by their ExternalDirectoryObjectId property. There are many ways to do this and one of the easiest would be to just get the Name (or other unique identifier) by looking up the group in AAD via MSOL PS. However, you can use the -Filter parameter for Get-DistributionGroup cmdlet and specify the id:

Get-DistributionGroup -Filter { ExternalDirectoryObjectId -eq $group.ExternalDirectoryObjectId }

I was working from home today and was trying to connect to Exchange Online via PowerShell. However, every time I tried to connect I would get the following error:

System.Xml.XmlException: For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document. To enable DTD processing set the DtdProcessing property on XmlReaderSettings to Parse and pass the settings into XmlReader.Create method.

It was working fine in a RD session in the office but not at home. After a quick Google I saw a few other posts with people mentioning that it could be to do with your ISP. Some have a 'feature' called Advanced Network Error Search that will present a custom search page if a domain name cannot be resolved. That may be useful for some people but it turns out that was the culprit.

My ISP is Virgin Media and all I had to do was go here and change my selection to No - I would not like to use the advanced network error search. After a quick reboot of my modem everything was working!