PowerScripting Podcast

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

• Today we’ll be speaking to noted Exchange MVP, trainer, and author Ilse van Criekinge.  Also on tap: news, resources, and a bunch of PowerShell tips for you.

News

The news is brought to you by Sapien Technologies.

• From the GPOGUY we get two new cmdlets get-SDMADTombstone and restore-SDMADTombstone – blog post: PowerShell Hits the Morgue
• PowerShell sill be big at TechEd next week
• Oisin has released a new Codeplex project he has been working on called PSMobile.  This is a PowerShell provider for your Windows Mobile phone.  Features include:
  • Copy, Move, Delete items between folders on your device (including Storage Card) with standard PowerShell Cmdlets
  • Move/Copy files to/from your device and your desktop with ConvertTo-WMFile and ConvertFrom-WMFile
  • Get device information and manipulate and explore the registry with a rich device object returned from Get-WMDevice

Interview

Our interview today is brought to you by Quest Software.

For a limited time, Quest is offering Powerscripting Podcast listeners a free copy of Jeffery Hicks upcoming book, Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell: TFM from Sapien Press.

Go to www.quest.com/powerscripting to register for your copy and download their free graphical user interface, script editor and Active Directory commands.

On Skype with us today is Ilse van Criekinge.  Ilse is the founder of Pro-Exchange, a resource for Belgian Exchange professionals.  She is the co-author of "Exchange Server 2007 Messaging Design and Deployment Study Guide", and author of Exchange Management Shell: TFM.  She was given a Microsoft MVP award for her work in the Exchange Server community.  Ilse is currently a trainer at Global Knowledge where she teaches classes on Exchange and other MS products.

Here are some rough notes from the interview:

• Background
  • Pro Exchange
    • founded 2.5 years ago
    • user group for exchange & Office Comm Server
    • forum, news, events
• Exchange Management Shell
  • Count mailboxes – get-mailbox | measure-object
  • Mass change: move mailbox stores, quotas
  • 248 cmdlets
• Resources for Exchange Admins
  • Books
    • Exchange Management Shell: TFM
    • Microsoft Exchange Server 2007: Tony Redmond’s Guide to Successful Implementation
    • Professional Windows PowerShell for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (Programmer to Programmer)

  • ExchangeNinjas.com
  • Blogroll
    • http://communicationsserverteam.com/
    • http://msexchangeteam.com/
    • http://www.exchangeninjas.com/
    • http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/
  • 45-day VM appliance with Exchange and DC (VMware compatible)
  • Get-Help
  • Microsoft’s EMS book
• Global Knowledge is a global training center for MS and other vendor products.
• Will be speaking at IT Professional (was IT Forum) in November
• You can find Ilse at Pro-Exchange or contact her by email: ilse.vancriekinge AT globalknowledge.be.

Resources

• PowerShellCommunity.org / PowerShellCentral.com script repository

• Here’s a blog post that will allow you to search the script repository from within Powershell
• And a set of scripts within the repository itself on the same.
• RSS feed now available (thanks Joel)
• Bruce Payette has released a new PowerShell Quick Reference Card for Developer Zone.
• PowerShell blogrolls from Hal and Jeffrey Hicks at Sapien.

Tips

The tips are brought to you today by iTripoli.

"Admin Script Editor provides a true integrated scripting environment for PowerShell.  Advanced features include an integrated PowerShell debugger, advanced code generating tools for Active Directory, Databases, XML files and more.  Let’s not forget about the exclusive PowerShell forms designer. What’s coming up? Soon its innovative and feature-rich ScriptPackger tool
will offer support for the dynamic installation of cmdlets! Come see for yourself– Admin Script Editor v3.5 is availble for a 45 day trial at AdminScriptEditor.com."

• Hal’s struggle with untruncated strings

  • "ls | ft Mode, LastWriteTime, Length, FullName -auto |out-file test.txt -width 1000000"
    As long as you put -auto on the format-table, it doesn’t space-pad the lines to the full width, so the file size is only as big as it needs to be to make the data fit in the columns

• Working with type extensions
  • From Hal:PowerShell Tip: Get page count of Word docs
  • From the extremely well written about_Types help file included with PowerShell (and available online): ADDING AN AGE MEMBER TO FILEINFO OBJECTS
• From Hal: PowerShell + VMware Script: Get-HostHealth.ps1
• From the $cript Fanatic blog we learn that it’s faster to select and then sort

Gotcha

• From Dmitry’s PowerBlog – Compare-Object issues

Closing

Please send us feedback!  You can send email to feedback@powerscripting.net, leave us reviews and vote for us on iTunes and PodcastAlley, blog comments and anywhere else you find us.

Don’t forget to visit www.quest.com/powershell to get the free book offer.

Other ways to interact with us: Facebook Group (forums, networking), Twitter (jonwalz & halr9000)

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

We have a great show for you guys today.  Several weeks back we had Jeffrey Snover on the show.  We had teased at the time that there was a third portion to the interview that deals with WinRM and WS-MGMT.  We’re going to play that today for you.  Also on tap: news, resources, and a bunch of PowerShell tips for you.

News

The news is sponsored by Sapien Technologies.

• BGShell now has a Codeplex page
• Microsoft Forefront 2008 (code-named Stirling) looks to be built on PowerShell. Here’s a blog post.
• PowerShell Plus supports the new CTP2 STA feature
  • This is big because it allows for you to play with all of the new WPF stuff we’ll be talking about later in the show.

Interview

Admin Script Editor provides a true integrated scripting environment for
PowerShell.  Advanced features include an integrated PowerShell debugger,
advanced code generating tools for Active Directory, Databases, XML files
and more.  Let’s not forget about the exclusive PowerShell forms designer.
What’s coming up? Soon its innovative and feature-rich ScriptPackger tool
will offer support for the dynamic installation of cmdlets! Come see for
yourself– Admin Script Editor v3.5 is available for a 45 day trial at
AdminScriptEditor.com.

We hope you enjoy the Jeffrey Snover clip on Win-RM and WS-MGMT.

Resources

• Very cool (and important) series on PowerShell & WPF from James Brundage on the Powershell Team blog.  Read this one first, he explains the rationale behind focusing on WPF:  PowerShell and WPF: WTF
  • WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )
  • WPF & PowerShell – Part 2 (Exploring WPF (and the rest of .NET) with Scripts)
  • WPF & PowerShell — Part 3 (Handling Events)
  • WPF & PowerShell — Part 4 (XAML & Show-Control)
  • WPF & PowerShell – Part 5 ( Using WPF & PowerShell Modules)
  • WPF & PowerShell – Part 6 (Running Functions in the Background)
• Beware the custom console. Kirk Munro does a great jobof explaining the problems that can result from custom consoles.
  • Disturbing hint seen on “The Industry Insiders” MSDN blog about a possible SQL Server 2008 “closed console”. Go leave feedback on the blog post and voice your opinions.
• Slides from a presentation that Keith Hill gave to a local user group to which he’s a member.
• Here’s an excellent post from Joel at HuddlesMasses.org in which he goes into great detail about regarding the new Modules feature in CTP2.  He’s figured out a ton of stuff which is not documented anywhere else yet so be sure to check it out.
• Here’s a link to Jaykul’s (whose real name is Joel–not Jaykul!) Select-Grid script.
• Speaking of TechEd earlier, Carter from VMware on the VI PowerShell blog has posted an entry with code and a video of a demo he’ll be showing at TechEd.
• Don Jones has an article in the latest TechNET magazine where he talks about different output types
• Also on VMware, Brandon Shell has put up a few screencast demos in a new “Playing around” series he’s doing on the BSonPoshblog.  The series is not exclusive to VMware, he also talks about Citrix, AD and more.
  • Video 1: Intro to VMWare VI Toolkit for Windows
  • Video 2: Controlling VMWare VMs with VI Toolkit
  • Video 3: Vmotion with VI ToolKit

Tips

• A basic tip on using the backtick character to escape in a string. From Richard Siddaway’s blog
• watch out for strings that look like collections
• From Oisin and his blog Nivot Ink: Manipulating remote SharePoint Lists with PowerShell.  The article is from late February but it came up earlier this week on the #powershell IRC channel (irc.freenode.net).

One-Liner

$a = (get-clipboard).split(“`n”).trim()

Get Involved!

• We love feedback.  You can tell because we ask for it at the beginning and end of every show.  🙂  You can reach us by email to feedback@powerscripting.net.  Also, please write reviews and vote for us on iTunes, Podcast Alley, Digg, and other podcast portals you use.  And blog comments are great, too.
• Don’t forget to visit www.quest.com/powershell to get the free book offer (while supplies last).
• Other ways to interact with us:
  • Facebook Group (forums, networking)
  • Twitter (jonwalz & halr9000)
  • IRC: #powershell on irc.freenode.net (web client available on powershelllive.com/irc)

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

We have an interview this week with noted group policy expert, Darren Mar-Elia.  And we have no news for you today, but a lot of resources, tips, and one-liners to ease your scripting pains.  And don’t forget about Quest’s excellent book giveaway offer.  Keep listening for details on that.

Interview

Interview sponsored by iTripoli.

Admin Script Editor provides a true integrated scripting environment for PowerShell.  Advanced features include an integrated PowerShell debugger, advanced code generating tools for Active Directory, Databases, XML files and more.  Let’s not forget about the exclusive PowerShell forms designer. What’s coming up? Soon its innovative and feature-rich ScriptPackger tool will offer support for the dynamic installation of cmdlets! Come see for yourself– Admin Script Editor v3.5 is availble for a 45 day trial at AdminScriptEditor.com.

Be sure to listen to the show for the interview, it’s a great one!

Resources

This segment is sponsored by our friends at Sapien.

• /\/\o\/\/ wants us to know that WPF is not only useful for Administrators with a “Hello World” WPF application and another cool demo showing some additional possibilities.
• From Dmitry’s PowerBlog, Manage Firewall with PowerShell/PowerGUI
  • New powerpack available for PowerGUI which lists your Windows Firewall rules in a table and has useful actions

• Select-StringRecurse function from Jared Par
• A PowerShell version of the Scriptomatic (found on Richard Siddaway’s blog )

Tips

The tips this week are brought to you by Quest Software.

For a limited time, Quest is offering Powerscripting Podcast listeners a free copy of Jeffery Hicks upcoming book, Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell: TFM from Sapien Press.

Go to www.quest.com/powerscripting to register for your copy and download their free graphical user interface, script editor and Active Directory commands.

• Newsgroup thread: Why are files created by Powershell twice as large?
• John Cook has a new blog post that talks about customizing the PowerShell command prompt

• Blog post from Lance’s TextBox: Using PSCredentials without a prompt

One-Liner

# Find files not touched in the last month

dir | ? { $_.LastWriteTime -le ([datetime]::Now).AddDays(-30) } | rm -whatif

# From Keith Hill on the newsgroup, a quick replacement for the pslist.exe util from Sysinternals

Get-Process PowerShell | Select ProcessName -Expand Modules

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

We’ve got a great show lined up for you today.  I am really pleased to announce our guest: Keith Hill, a well-known developer in the PowerShell Community.  Also, as we hinted during the last show, your participation and support makes advertisers happy, and when they’re happy, they give away stuff.  This one is cool because many will enter–and many will win!  Stay tuned for details.  And as usual, we’ve got a bunch of news, tips, and resources to share.

News

This week’s show is brought to you by Quest Software.

For a limited time, Quest is offering Powerscripting Podcast listeners a free copy of Jeffery Hicks upcoming book, Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell: TFM from Sapien Press.

Go to www.quest.com/powerscripting to register for your copy and download their free graphical user interface, script editor and Active Directory commands.

• Dmitry (from Dmitry’s PowerBlog) has a tutorial on how to do the impossible–install PowerShell on 2008 Server Core!
• Marco Shaw wrote a chapter on PowerShell in the newly released Windows Server 2008 Administrator’s Companion according to Marco’s blog post it’s about 80 pages and is an overview intended for administrators that are new to PowerShell.

 Interview

• Keith Hill’s blog
• Effective PowerShell series
• Get the PowerShell Community Extensions here

Resources

• /\/\O\/\/ has a beta version of his WMI explorer that uses WPF

Tips

• Article from Dimitry from the PowerGUI team: Execute PowerShell Scripts from Your Smartphone
  Suppose you are on vacation/commute/away from your desk and get an emergency IT request. Would not it be cool to just text the PowerShell commands from your phone to your desk, have PowerShell over there execute the script, and send you back the results?
• Joel from Huddled Masses has written a powerful snapin for working with HTML and XML files.
• Dev tip: How to Register Cmdlets, Providers, and Host Applications
  This section describes how to register cmdlets, Windows PowerShell providers, and hosting applications with Windows PowerShell.
• Hal’s Get-Parameter script (need to blog it first, don’t want to give out this link: http://powershellcentral.com/scripts/255)
• Bunch of CTP2-specific stuff:
  • Remoting with PowerShell QuickStart(PowerShell Team blog)

    PowerShell V2 introduces a new capability which allows you to remotely manage machines in your organization. I will give a basic overview of PowerShell remoting here and follow it up with some adavanced topics later. Are you ready for the fun..

  • Fun with Script Cmdlets (PowerShell Team blog)
    Script Cmdlets are one of the coolest things about the newer version of PowerShell.  A Script cmdlet allows you to use all of the variety of cmdlet parameter sets inside of PowerShell functions.

  • PowerShell Transactions QuickStart (PowerShell Team blog)
    The second CTP of PowerShell V2 (CTP2) introduces full engine support for transactions – groups of actions that can be finalized or undone in an all-or-nothing way.
  • Joel from Huddled Masses wrote a couple of posts about using STA (Single Threaded Apartment) mode and a few other CTP2 goodies to build some wicked-cool GUI elements using WPF and XAML.
    • WPF From PowerShell – A Splash Screen
    • WPF From PowerShell – Updating Windows

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

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 you’re 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.  🙂

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

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

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.”

• 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.  There’s a “Tech Preview” 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
  • Jeffery’s 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: “Citrix has released some cmdlets for use with their XenServer virtualization product. No where near as powerful as VMWare’s cmdlets, but at least its a start. You can check them out and get more information at this URL.”
• 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 you’re 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.  He’s been with MSFT for 17 years!  Old timer. His team “owns” the core engine of IIS and the PS provider is a subset of that.  Below are some notes from the interview.

• Who are you
• What’s 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 “$servers = get-QADComputer srv*”.
  • 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 “itemthatyouwantremoved”
  • 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 tipsof the week.
    • $servers = new-object system.collection.arraylist; $servers.Remove(“item”)
• PowerShell Power User Tips: Current Directory – The core of this tip is very simple: Windows tracks your application’s “current directory” … 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
  • “Excel Row Format” – 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 it’s quite easy to integrate the old with the new in PowerShell.  He’d also found that grep.exe in some cases is much faster than select-string, so it was a good example for his point.  Jonathan’s test had Grep for Windows 2:30 and Select-String 11:08 against the same 6.7 GB log file.
  • $cmd = “grep.exe `”$username`” $logfile”
    Invoke-Expression $cmd | Set-Content F:\4report\$username.txt
• Don Jones post “Include in PowerShell” dot source a PS1 file at the beginning of your script – http://blog.sapien.com/index.php/2008/04/08/include-in-powershell/