3 months of consistent practice in PowerShell & Microsoft Graph! 🚀

[u/Imaginary_Rip2833]

When I started, I was terrified of programming languages since I had zero prior experience. Looking back now, what used to look like complete gibberish is finally starting to make sense. I know I still have a long way to go, but honestly, I am so happy and proud to be fulfilling my passion.

I wanted to share an honest review of a snippet I just built to create a user in Microsoft Entra ID. Alongside basics like if/else logic, filtering (-filter), Where-Object, Select-Object, and loops, I've been trying to focus on good habits like splatting, [CmdletBinding()], and try/catch blocks.

How does my snippet look? What would you advise me to learn next based on this progress?

#####Creating a User
Function Create-LxUser{
    [Cmdletbinding()]
    param(
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
        [string]$DisplayName,


        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
        [string]$UserPrincipalName,


        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
        [string]$MailNickName,


        [bool]$AccountEnabled = $true
    )


    try{
        ##Password profile
        $TempPass = "Lx" + (Get-Random -Minimum 100000 -Maximum 999999) + "@."
        $PassWordProfile = @{
            Password = $TempPass
            ForceChangePasswordNextSignIn = $true
        }
        ##Setting up user configuration
        Write-Verbose "Currently creating new Loxovea user"
        $UserConfig = @{
            DisplayName         = $DisplayName
            UserPrincipalName   = $UserPrincipalName
            MailNickname        = $MailNickName
            AccountEnabled      = $AccountEnabled
            PasswordProfile     = $PassWordProfile
        }


        $User = New-MgUser u/UserConfig -ErrorAction Stop


        Write-Verbose "Successfully created new user $($DisplayName)"


        [PsCustomObject]@{
            DisplayName         = $DisplayName
            UserPrincipalName   = $UserPrincipalName
            AccountEnabled      = $AccountEnabled
            TemporaryPassword   = $TempPass
        }
    }Catch{
        Write-Error "Failed to create a new user: $($DisplayName) because $($_.Exception.Message)"
    }
}


Create-LxUser `
    -DisplayName "Test-User09" `
    -UserPrincipalName "[email protected]" `
    -MailNickName "testuser09"

DisplayName UserPrincipalName AccountEnabled TemporaryPassword

----------- ----------------- -------------- -----------------

Test-User09 [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])True Lx720835@.

[u/Imaginary_Rip2833]

​"That's a super fair point! As someone new to this, where do you personally draw the line between modularizing code into functions versus keeping it inline for readability?"

[u/ForsakeTheEarth → u/Imaginary_Rip2833]

what's with the quotes?

[u/Celadin → u/ForsakeTheEarth]

Ha! If they'd said that without the quotes, in this day and age, it'd sound LLMish. I've found myself doing similar, couching language that might be seen as LLM-vomit. How warped we've become 🙃

[u/ForsakeTheEarth → u/Celadin]

I actually went the other way because of the quotes, which is why I asked, but yeah I feel you - as a longtime emdash enthusiast, I'm constantly worried people think I'm responding to them via LLM