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Learn some useful tips for using the open source project called Pester with PowerShell, which you can use for testing and more.

On this episode, I cover all of the Microsoft news this week including the first Redstone 2 build, playing with OneClip, and those mysterious cloud files are making progress.

Because I can’t stop interrupting Brad today, this edition of Short Takes focuses on the London police and their love affair with Windows XP, Xbox One success in July, Russia fines Google for antitrust abuses, and South Korea thinks about it, and much more.

Microsoft has launched a preview for a new set of NVIDIA-powered virtual machines in Azure that can be used for compute-intensive and graphic-intensive workloads. See the specs, pricing and availability.

Always Encrypted is a feature of SQL Server 2016 that Microsoft released in Azure SQL Database in June 2016. Russell describes what Always Encrypted technology is and how it works with Azure SQL Database.

Google is continuing to expand its infastracutre to better compete with Amazon and Microsoft; Gartner is starting to recognize the company’s new initiatives and has listed them as a visionary.

Russell demonstrates how to use PowerShell to quickly create a self-signed certificate, which are handy to use in test scenarios where a certificate is a requirement.

Microsoft Windows Secure Boot has a big problem. It’s no longer secure, and can’t be fixed—or so say a pair of security researchers who found the issue. Apparently, Microsoft created a secret backdoor, for internal QA use. But two Ring Of Lightning researchers uncovered the so-called “golden key.”

Aidan walks through how to use the built-in tools for troubleshooting faulty virtual machines in Azure: diagnose tools, activity logs, resource health, boot diagnostics, reset password, redeploy, and support request.

In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll look at why you might need to back up data stored in the cloud and two options for backing up Office 365.

Learn how to change which users can have their account credentials cached on read-only domain controllers (RODC).

Aidan explains a bit of the history of how System Center Advisor (SCA) has evolved into Azure Log Analytics (OMS). Microsoft is rapidly adding solutions to Log Analytics (OMS) so it can eventually replace SCOM.