In This Episode

• We have a great show lined up for you today.  Don Jones from Sapien is here.  [applause]  He'll be giving us a taste of the trade show circuit, going into CTP2, and other goings-on in the PowerShell world.  And of course we have tips and resources and whatever else we can throw in.
• We will be announcing the winner of our Vista Ultimate giveaway on Show 26 next week.  If you haven't entered yet, now is the time!  It's really easy, just send feedback about the show to powerscripting@gmail.com and you are in the running.

News

The News today is sponsored by SDM Software. 
"SDM Software provides innovative solutions that combine PowerShell and Group Policy to help reduce the complexity of managing your Windows systems.  Their unique GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell, provides the means to automate the management of your Group Policy Objects. To get more information about these products and download trial copies,
visit sdmsoftware.com/powerscripting.php."

• CTP2 is out
  • Joel Bennett has a blog post outlining some of the new features he's found
  • latest build of PowerGUI supports it already

Interview

[sponsor] Our interview today is brought to you by Quest Software.
Quest LOVES PowerShell. Go to www.quest.com / PowerShell and download their free graphical user interface, script editor and Active Directory cmdlets. While youâre there, join their online community where you can share ideas and download free PowerPacks to extend PowerGUI.  Visit www.quest.com / powershell today!

We have Don Jones with us on the phone today.  Don Jones, for the three people who don't know who he is, has authored over thirty books.  He's a frequent speaker at conventions and also runs training classes for PowerShell.  Here are some notes we took during the conversation. 

• MS MVP Summit
• MMS last week
  • 5th year
• Training videos
  • fundamentals class, twice a week for 4 weeks = $400
  • scriptingoutpost.com
• New version of Primalscript 2007
  • coming soon: visual forms editor
• Blog: blog.sapien.com
• CTP2
  • e-book on sapienpress.com: PowerShell v2: TFM, updated for CTP2!
  • Remoting
    • push cmds to remote computer
    • bring results back
    • interactive like ssh
  • transactional registry operations
  • create your own cmdlets (script cmdlets)
  • new little features
    • convertTo-Html
      • head parameter
      • css links
    • get-wmiobject
    • get-process, get-service
  • send feedback to connect.microsoft.com
  • New graphical console
• Shows coming up: Tech Mentor, TechEd
• New e-books: 2008 Server - What's New, What's Changed, Exchange Management: TFM, cookbook style

Resources

• Tobias from ScriptInternals has just started a PowerShell blog, you can find it on PowerShellCommunity.org.  He intends to post often about how to use PowerShell Plus features.
• Real quick mention for newbies: you must see these tutorials.
  • Essential PowerShell by Kirk Munro (aka Poshoholic)
  • Keith Hill has his Effective PowerShell series which is also great.
  • Mastering PowerShell in your Lunch Break is another favorite.
• New PowerShell Training Videos from ScriptingOutpost.com from Don Jones
• Quest AD Cmdlets Beta 1.1 available

Tips

• We found a nice script on the blog post PowerShell and Excel (from the "Powershell,Passion,Persistence and Pursuit" blog).  This script reads a server list from a text file and collects IP configuration settings of each server and uses that data to populate an excel sheet.
• Using SQL with Powershell
  • PowerShell TFM
  • iSQL, sqlcmd, Invoke-Sqlcmd
  • Article: PowerShell, XML, and SQL Server
• Hal wrote an article that explains how to automate the syncing of iTunes to your iPod, using PowerShell of course.
• Interesting article that talks about working with Hyper-V virtual hard disks.  Some neat examples in there about passing text to console apps like diskpart.exe.

One-Liner

• $env:path.split(';') updated by John Cook

Gotchas

• The alias for Set-Content collides with sc.exe.  Workaround is to be sure to type sc-dot-exe.
• There is no Remove-Alias cmdlet!  You can use the alias: PSProvider with "del" to get the job done.
• Oisin Graham has written about a big gotcha with working with remoting and WinRM with computers which are not domain members.

Give Away

• As mentioned at the top of the show, we'll be announcing the winner of our Vista Ultimate giveaway next week.  If you want a chance at it, send us feedback about the show to powerscripting@gmail.com.

Emails!

• We got some GREAT feedback from a few listeners lately.  Some of whom were obviously motivated by the free copy of Vista, which is why we did it.  :)

In This Episode

• Today weâll be speaking to Steven Behrns from iTripoli, the developers who brought you Admin Script Editor. Also on tap: news, resources, and a bunch of PowerShell tips for you. In addition, weâve got a product giveaway, the first of many! But you have to listen to find out how to enter.

News

The News today is sponsored by SDM Software.

Before we go into the spiel, Iâd like to mention that weâve gotten some great feedback from Quest already, so thanks to everyone who has done a clickthrough and filled out the form. You do keep doing that, and we keep the advertisers happy, and that allows US to do more for you. You will start to see the results of that in this very show!

âSDM Software provides innovative solutions that combine PowerShell and Group Policy to help reduce the complexity of managing your Windows systems. Their unique GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell, provides the means to automate the management of your Group Policy Objects.
To get more information about these products and download trial copies,
visit sdmsoftware.com/powerscripting.php.â

• We want to highlight a ton of IMPORTANT posts which Jeffrey Snover has made over the past few weeks:
  • How Could You Top CTP1?
    • This post has the background for why and how some upcoming changes will be made.
  • Changes in upcoming CTP
    • This post has an extract from the release notes for CTP2. Very important to read if you want to keep up with the new version. Thereâs also some good discussion in the comments attached to the article.
  • Get-Random
    • I love this quote: I saw THIS posting over on Mark Minasiâs forums that caught my eye. It gives you a random help file under the motto of: âA powershell help file a day, keeps Don Jones awayâ
    • The article goes on to talk about a new cmdlet by the name Get-Random which will get you a random number, orâgrab a random item from a collection.
• iTripoli just released version 3.5 of their Admin Script Editor. (Should be out by the time you read this.) It now includes a debugger and has a ton of PowerShell templates.
• VMware just announced that Beta 2 of VMware Server 2 (the free version of their virtualization software) is manageable by their PowerShell Toolkit! This is awesome news for smaller shops which have not shelled out for their higher-end Virtual Infrastructure products.

Interview

[sponsor] Our interview today is brought to you by Quest Software.
Quest LOVES PowerShell. Go to www.quest.com / PowerShell and download their free graphical user interface, script editor and Active Directory cmdlets. While youâre there, join their online community where you can share ideas and download free PowerPacks to extend PowerGUI. Visit www.quest.com / powershell today!

We interview Steven Behrns from iTripoli in todayâs show. Be sure to listen! Here are some of the questions we asked him.

1. Who is Steven? What do you do at iTripoli, and what is your background?
   1. co-founder
   2. company started in 2001 w/Bob Kelly. Kixscript editor
2. What are your favorite features?
   1. Comprehensive code wizards to generate ps script code for ADSI, WMI, XML, database connections, etc.
   2. Script packager, turns your scripts into an executable.
   3. Script Form Designer
3. When did iTripoli get into PowerShell? Was it a hard sell internally or was this an obvious way forward for ASE?
   1. Thought about this in 2006 during a code overhaul discussion.
   2. First supported powershell in spring of 2007 with the release of 3.0.
4. What are the primary design goals for ASE? How has it done in the marketplace and changed over time?
   1. Everything related to making scripting tasks easier.
   2. They want ASE to appear invisible and intuitive to the scripters.
5. How long was the dev cycle (for PowerShell support)? What were your greatest challenges?
6. Where do you see PowerShell in two years? How will ASE evolve to match it?
7. So I heard you have something to show us?
   1. They wrote a podcast / MP3 player entirely in PowerShell as an example of how much you can do.
   2. The graphics in the GUI are embedded WITHIN the script file using base-64 encoding.

Thanks a bunch to Steven, we had fun with the interview.

Resources

• We have two links for you today from John Robbins, author and master debugger. Itâs a heartwarming before and after powershell love story. He also links to a Compile-Help script which we somehow missed when it was new. This script grabs the help files from all installed cmdlets as well as the about topics, and packages them into a HTML help file for easy reading.
• Carter at VMware (yes, Hal has a thing about them, sorry) also blogged about a way to have your VMware alert events fire off instant messages using Jabber

One-Liner

• One liner sent to us by John Cook and a write up on his blog
  • $env:path -replace â;â, â`nâ

Give Away

• A beautiful NFR copy of Windows Vista Ultimate could be yours. Listen to the show for how to enter.

In This Episode

• Today weâve got an interview with a senior program manager from the IIS team at Microsoft.  Weâve also got news, resources, and a bunch of PowerShell tips for you.

News

The News today is sponsored by SDM Software:
âSDM Software provides innovative solutions that combine PowerShell and Group Policy to help reduce the complexity of managing your Windows systems.  Their unique GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell, provides the means to automate the management of your Group Policy Objects. To get more information about these products and download trial copies, visit sdmsoftware.com/powerscripting.php.â

• Reports are coming in from MVPs right and left that the things they learned about the AD teams forthcoming PowerShell support echoes what were heard in our interview with Jeffery Snover.
• Thanks to Andrew Westgarth who blogged about some really cool IIS7 news.  Thereâs a âTech Previewâ now available for a PowerShell provider to manage your IIS server.  Very cool possibilities.  Download and overview are on blogs.iss.net, and on learn.iss.net they have several walkthroughs.
• Pash - a cross platform open source reimplementation of PowerShell has been released
  • Jefferyâs post - http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/04/08/powershell-on-linux-solaris-mac-etc.aspx
  • Sourceforge page - http://pash.sourceforge.net/
• And thanks also to Mark Schill for this one: âCitrix has released some cmdlets for use with their XenServer virtualization product. No where near as powerful as VMWareâs cmdlets, but at least its a start. You can check them out and get more information at this URL.â
• Windows PowerShell Virtual User Group Meeting #5 happened on April 22
  • Bart DeSmet (Microsoft) gave a cool presentation of script cmdlets
  • Steven Nelson talked briefly about Powershell documentation - PowerShell videos are coming
  • Look for the download at http://MarcoShaw.blogspot.com

Interview

Our interview today is brought to you by Quest Software.
Quest LOVES PowerShell. Go to www.quest.com / PowerShell and download their free graphical user interface, script editor and Active Directory cmdlets. While youâre there, join their online community where you can share ideas and download free PowerPacks to extend PowerGUI.  Visit www.quest.com / powershell today!

Today we speak with Thomas Deml from Microsoft.  He is the Senior Program Manager in the IIS team.  Heâs been with MSFT for 17 years!  Old timer. His team âownsâ the core engine of IIS and the PS provider is a subset of that.  Below are some notes from the interview.

• Who are you
• Whatâs your background at MS and elsewhere
• Talk about the IIS7 management cmdlets
  • Get/Set-WebConfiguration
  • Start-WebItem
  • Remove-WebConfigurationProperty
  • Ability to use XPath filters
• Talk about the IIS7 PSprovider
  • Provider timeline - 2nd beta in June, final in October
  • Features
    • ability to configure IIS and ASP.net, sites, vdirs, apps, all that
    • ability to delegate
    • root of namespace: sites, app pools
• What does the future hold (that you can discuss)
  • We talk about Server Core

Resources

• Brandon Shell is doing a series of useful Citrix scripts so head over to http://bsonposh.com to check them out
• PoShMon - A PowerShell snap-in for working with PolyMon (Open source monitoring solution) - http://powershell-basics.com/2008/04/07/poshmon-for-polymon/

Tips

• This came up on #PowerShell (on freenode.net): How can I remove an item from a collection? 
  For example â$servers = get-QADComputer srv*â.

   

  • Option 1 - Set the item to $null.  This does not actually remove the item, but for most purposes it serves well.
    • $servers[3] = $null
  • Option 2 - Create a new collection which is a subset of the first.  Drawback here is double the memory as the collection is copied in place.
    • $servers = $servers -ne âitemthatyouwantremovedâ
  • Option 3 - Use system.collection.arraylist instead of a generic array.  More steps, but the item or items are removed, and it much more efficient than option 2.  The Scripting Guys explain it well in one of their PowerShell tips of the week.
    • $servers = new-object system.collection.arraylist; $servers.Remove(âitemâ)
• PowerShell Power User Tips: Current Directory - The core of this tip is very simple: Windows tracks your applicationâs âcurrent directoryâ â and you can get and set this location using static methods of the System.IO.Directory class: SetCurrentDirectory and GetCurrentDirectory.  (Thanks Jaykul of Huddledmasses.org.)
• Newsgroup posts
  • âExcel Row Formatâ - In this thread, Oisin explains how to teach yourself how to automate Excel by examining vbscript created by the macro recorder.
• This snippet is from Chris in Charleston, SC.  He sent a long email with feedback (which you all should do) with several suggestions.  Thanks, Chris!  This tip is that itâs quite easy to integrate the old with the new in PowerShell.  Heâd also found that grep.exe in some cases is much faster than select-string, so it was a good example for his point.  Jonathanâs test had Grep for Windows 2:30 and Select-String 11:08 against the same 6.7 GB log file.
  • $cmd = âgrep.exe `â$username`â $logfileâ
    Invoke-Expression $cmd | Set-Content F:\4report\$username.txt
• Don Jones post âInclude in PowerShellâ dot source a PS1 file at the beginning of your script - http://blog.sapien.com/index.php/2008/04/08/include-in-powershell/