Intune Assignment Filters That Never Match
Microsoft’s own cpuArchitecture filter example saves without complaint and drops every x64 Windows device, which reports amd64. My command checks a rule locally the way the service parsed and matched it.
Windows
What the Intune Agent Counts as Installed
A file rule set to “does not exist” saves in the portal and Graph, and the Intune agent never counts the app as installed. My harness checks Win32 detection, requirements and installs the way devices did.
Running Intune Scripts Locally the Way the Agent Does
My remediation prints success and exits 0 over a Set-ItemProperty error, and Intune calls it Failed. My harness runs scripts the way the agent does, as me, as SYSTEM or as another account, and now agrees.
Linting Intune Scripts With Rules Measured on Real Devices
Microsoft’s sample detection for expired certificates returns a count before its exit 1, so it exits 0 and the remediation never runs. My linter flags that, and every rule cites the device test behind it.
Testing Intune Scripts Before Intune Does
Intune runs my scripts in Windows PowerShell 5.1, from system32, often as SYSTEM. My console is none of those, so I built a module that tests scripts the way the agent will, from what real devices did.
Active Directory Test Data, a Year and Six Providers Later
In August 2025 I published a module that filled a lab domain and tore it down again. Its three commands still run, and almost nothing underneath them survived the move into TestEnvironment.
Learning Resources
A running list of the books, communities, modules, tools and certification paths I have actually used. Kept as I find things, including the ones I wish I had known about earlier.
Moving This Blog From Ghost to Hugo Without Changing a Single Post URL
Three hundred dollars a year for Ghost(Pro) to host forty posts, with a members list four rows long and one of them me. I was paying for a CMS to serve what had always been a static site. Moving it to Hugo on Azure Static Web Apps changed not one post URL.
Get-NetNeighbor: The Cmdlet You Underuse
Two firewall changes in one maintenance window. By morning one box pings the gateway, cannot reach the Plex VM, and looks perfectly healthy in UniFi. Routing is fine. It is working from a cache written before I moved the network underneath it.
WMIC Is Gone. Here Is What To Use Instead
A utility script died on a fresh Windows 11 box. wmic bios get serialnumber, gone, and the DISM command that puts it back stops working this month. The one-liners map onto Get-CimInstance cleanly. The for /f blocks wrapped around them do not.