PowerScripting Podcast

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

• Lots of news and tips
• We missed Jonathan
• Our first contest–with actual prizes!

News

• The PowerShell team blog brings us the news that “PowerShell continues to win awards with Redmond Magazine’s 2008 Editor’s “Slickest Time Saving Tool” co-winner to go along with PS’s Best of Tech-Ed Attendees award and Best of Tech-Ed Client awards.”
• Kirk Munro covers PowerGUI on DNR.tv .NET Rocks! and RunAsRadio.
• Karl Prosser (admin frameworks MVP and PowerShell Analyzer architect) was interviewed on the “A Couple of Admins” podcast Episode 35. The interview lasts for almost an hour and I really enjoyed it.
• Shay@Isreal (The $cript Fanatic blog) put together a cool PowerShell toolbar
• Admin Frameworks MVP Brandon Shell was interviewed on the CS Techcast podcast. Hal listened to it on the way home the other day and he thought it was a really good interview.
• VMware’s VI-Toolkit open beta is expected in March
  • Over 70 new cmdlets
  • This example would create a snapshot of every VM:
    get-vm | new-snapshot
• Dale Lane, author of the IBM Websphere MQ PowerShell snapin is considering writing another tool, this time a PowerShell library for the IBM DB/2 RDBMS.  He is seeking feedback, so if you or someone you know might be interested, please visit this blog post and leave feedback.
• New Video Podcast: PowerShell-Basics.com
  • This is created by Steve from the A Couple of Admins Podcast.  He wanted to create a screencast-only video podcast.  His first show should be out by the time you hear this.

Tips

There’s a ton of Scripting Guys stuff we meant to cover in the interview show last time that we never got around to:

• PowerShell Graphical Help (which we’ve mentioned before)
• PowerShell Scripting Toolbox
• Tons of categorized examples in their script repository
• “Hey, Scripting Guy!” help columns on the website and in Technet Magazine
• And here’s a link to the Scirpitng Games we talked about in the last show.

This was used as part of a script Jonathan helped a co-worker with to batch sign ActiveX controls. Thanks to Joel for help on this one.

[Diagnostics.Process]::Start("cmd.exe","/C $robocopycmd")

Hal talks about renaming multiple files which end in an underscore:

$files | %{ Rename-Item -Path $_.FullName -NewName ( $_.Name -replace '_$' ) }

Jonathan talks about grabbing just the first few lines of a huge log file:

get-content *.log -totalCount 5

Hal parried, then riposted with:

get-content | select-object -first 5

PowerScripting / A Couple of Admins Cmdlet Contest

Contest Rules:

• Three cmdlets announced on each show.
• Contest entries will be a PowerShell script using all six cmdlets.
• Entries can be submitted to contest@acoupleofadmins.com
• Submissions will be taken until February 14th
• Two winners will be drawn from the entries – one random, one for best script as decided by Steve, Hal, and Jonathan.
• Prize – commercial license for PowerShell Analyzer (donated by Shell Tools)
• Prize – commercial license for the NetCmdlets (donated by /n Software)

What are the cmdlets?  You have to listen to find out.  😉

Thanks again to all of you listeners out there!  Your feedback makes it all worthwhile, keep that rolling in.  Our email address is powerscripting@gmail.com, or you can comment on this very blog post.  Also find us on Facebook here (Jonathan), here (Hal),  and here (PowerScripting Podcast group).  Our group needs more members!  The Scripting guys are ahead by a teensy bit.

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

• Greg and Jean “The Scripting Guys” themselves are our special guests. Head over to the Script Center!
• Jonathan was out with back problems.

Ways to interact with us:

• Facebook: PowerScripting Podcast group
• Email: powerscripting@gmail.com
• Vote or write a review for us in iTunes
• Leave comments on the blog

See you next time!

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

• Special guest this episode is scripting guru Don Jones, the well-known author of several books, presenter and trainer at conferences and in webcasts and a lot more.
• Several interesting tips for your scripting

Resources

• We go into the history of PowerShellCommunity.org and future plans for the site. We also go into detail on the sections of the website and the mission of the non-profit organization behind it all.
• Don gives the last holdouts a really hard sell for learning PowerShell.

Tips

• Huddledmasses.org: Editing Media Tags from PowerShell
  • This started out as a question on the #PowerShell IRC channel (irc.freenode.net) about how to edit tags on mp3 files, but we quickly discovered TagLib#, which lets you access and edit tags on not only mp3s, but on everything from asf and avi to wma…
• PowerShell Team: Supporting -Whatif, -Confirm, -Verbose – In SCRIPTS!
  • J. Snover: “This is a super-important issue so you should definitely start using this in your scripts that you share with others (that have side effects on the system). Please try it out and blog about it to others so that it becomes a community norm.”
• $cript Fanatic: Creating and managing processes in PowerShell
  • Shay covers several ways to create and manage processes. WMI, .NET and more. Good stuff.

We ran long with Don, so combined with the slow news cycle for the holidays we just skipped the news this time.

Don’t forget–we love feedback. In particular we’d like to know if you like the guests, or do you like more of the one vs. one approach? It’s a lot of fun to have guests on the show and to do the special interviews and segments. Please let us know if this is getting to be too much or any other thoughts you may have. If you have ideas on guests you’d like to hear, let us know.

Ways to interact with us:

• Facebook: PowerScripting Podcast group
• Email: powerscripting@gmail.com
• Vote or write a review for us in iTunes
• Leave comments on the blog

See you next time!

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

• Special guest this episode, Joel Bennett aka “Jaykul” from HuddledMasses.org
• “The Developer Show”
• New software releases, interviews, other goodies

News

• AD Cmdlets RTM (Dmitry’s PowerBlog)”We kind of kept sticking to the fashion of perpetual betas for quite some time now (since the first 1.0 beta released late March through the RC 1.0.5 this fall) and we feel that the product is now feature rich and stable enough…”
• Windows PowerShell Holiday Gift Guide: Books (Technet Scripting Center)”The Scripting Guys present their first-ever Windows PowerShell Holiday Gift Guide. In this inaugural gift guide we survey some of the best PowerShell software, script editors, cmdlets, and add-ins that money can buy.”
• An Interview with Lee Holmes (Technet Scripting Center)”Lee Holmes is a developer on the Windows PowerShell team and author of the new book Windows PowerShell Cookbook (which includes a foreword written by Scripting Guy Dean Tsaltas).”
• An Interview with Lee Holmes (A Couple of Admins Podcast)
• Cisco opening up IOS (Network World)”Cisco’s plan to open up its venerable IOS routing software to customers and third-party developers is a bold move designed to further the company’s push to make the network the epicenter of the virtual data center.”

Resources

• Expresso Regular Expression Development ToolVery cool tool to create regexes.  Free registration required.

Tips

• Discussion on an email from listener John Cook:

“I’m a programmer, so I don’t find PowerShell (or VBScript etc.) difficult as a language. What I find difficult about scripting is scripting itself, such as recognizing when it’s worth the effort to write a script. I’m a big fan of scripting, but I don’t write a lot of scripts because I don’t think to do it. Or I’m doing something that’s not repetitive enough to script.

I would find it interesting to listen to a show about scripting strategy: organizing tasks so they can be scripted, etc.

I would also find it interesting to hear a discussion about testing scripts. I’m a fan of test-driven development, but scripts are hard to test. Scripts are full of side effects: creating or deleting files, setting properties, sending email, etc.”

• Discussion with Joel about his new Windows Automation Snapin for PowerShell (WASP)
  • Blog post: http://huddledmasses.org/window-gui-automation-from-powershell/
  • New Codeplex project: http://codeplex.com/WASP
  • This is basically an upgrade to the Win32.Windows snapin Joel released a while back, the one thing that’s missing in this release that was possible in that one is using frame-set definitions to position windows. That will make it back in eventually, but in the meantime, I present some major new additions which add up to the ability to do 90% of what you’d want to do in testing or automating your winforms app’s UI.
• Also covered: Joel’s experiences developing a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) PowerShell host.

One-Liner

(new-object -com SAPI.SpVoice).Speak("Hello $($env:UserName)",2)

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

• News: Software updates, books, PS Virtual User Group (recording will be available)
• In Resources, we’ll tell you about an interview with Jeffrey Snover, and several pieces of software.
• Cmdlet of the Week: New-Object
• In Tips, we’ll talk about Hal’s recent blog post involving benchmarking
• We’ve got a one-liner with a GUI.
• Gotchas about WMI
• Thanks for feedback from: Mace, John Cook, Justin Stokes

News

• PowerShell + is now free for non-commercial use!
• PowerShell TFM (2nd Edition)to be available soon – May be available already from the Sapien site
  • Don says Sapien tends to run some insane deals on New Years Eve so it may be worth watching out for that
• PowerShell Virtual User Group meeting #2 was Dec 4th – This was the second virtual event.  Speakers were: Don Jones (MVP), Dmitry Sotnikov (MVP), Oisin Grehan and Jeffrey Snover (Microsoft).  Recording is supposed to be available, but as of this moment, Hal can’t find a darn thing about it.  Watch Marco’s blog and PowerShellCommunity.org.

Resources

• Jeffery Snover interview at IT Forum (video from PodTech)
• Admin Script Editorfrom ITripoli
  • Hal and Jonathan currently evaluating–looks extremely cool.
• PowerGUI – Version 1.0.12 released, now includes a debugger and more.  Don’t forget the known issues and patch to work with the CTP.
• SpecOps Command– use Group Policy to deploy and manage PowerShell scripts
  • Can deploy PowerShell itself using GPO–as well as your favorite snapins!
  • Includes new cmdlets
  • All operations that you can perform from the administrative user interfaces you can perform from PowerShell.

Cmdlet of the week

• New-Object
  • Creates an instance of a .Net or COM object.
  • Examples:

new-object -comobject InternetExplorer.Application 

 new-object -comobject "Shell.Application"

• Also see Appendix E of the new book Windows PowerShell Cookbook

Tips

• Discussion of Hal’s blog post: Solving Problems with PowerShell: Simple Benchmarking
• You can access mySQL databases from Powershell using .NET.  Check out Get-MySQLDataSet.
  • Oops–due to a clerical error, we forgot to cover this topic on the show!  We’ll get it next time, Kemis!

One-liners

[system.Windows.Forms.MessageBox]::show("Hi mom")

Gotchas

• Win32_Service.Change() methodand weird WMI stuff
  • Rfoust@ #PowerShell was looking for a way to change the service password on remote machines.  There’s a change() method but it’s paremeters are really odd.  A vbscript example I found shows something like change(,,,,,,,”password”) but it doesn’t work in PowerShell.  Instead you have to insert $nulls and separate them by commas like so:
    $rc=$svc.Change($Null,$Null,$Null,$Null,$Null,$Null,$Null,N3wP@ssw)
  • Solution by Jeffrey Hicks on the PowerShell.com forum thread “Using WMI and/or Get-Service / Set-Service to modify service properties”
  • Why doesn’t just changing the properties, which are read-write (as you can see using get-member) do the trick?  We may never know.  😦  (That’s a quip designed to inspire a listener to chime in with the answer.)

Thanks again to all of you listeners out there!  Your feedback makes it all worthwhile, keep that rolling in.  Our email address is powerscripting@gmail.com, or you can comment on this very blog post.  Also find us on Facebook here (Jonathan), here (Hal),  and here (PowerScripting Podcast group).

Also a big shout out to Steve and the rest of the A Couple of Admins Podcasting crew!

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

This is a special episode. /\/\o\/\/ (ThePowerShellGuy) joins us to give a report on ITForum in Barcelona. Marc tells us about some of the sessions he attended and people he met. I will be adding links in the coming days.

Thanks for listening!

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

Introduction

• Jam-packed show today! We ran so long, we had to skip the cmdlet-of-the-week segment!
• We have a Special Guest, and in fact our first guest, Brandon Shell, an MVP in Automation and author of the BSonPosh blog.

News

• CTP!
  • Unless you’ve been under a rock, you probably heard about the PowerShell 2.0 Community Technology Preview. Go download it! Here is what’s new.
  • Jeffery’s warning CTP -ne Beta
• Citrix “Gets it”
  • As pointed out by Dmitry and others, “From a management standpoint, Citrix is getting high on PowerShell and intend to rewrite the APIs to make everything available from Powershell scripting.
• Windows PowerShell Virtual User Group Meeting #2
  • Time: December 4th, 2007 at 12PM (noon) EST (New York time)
  • Registration site:http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=122431
    Event Code: 122431
  • Guests: Don Jones (MVP), Dmitry Sotnikov (MVP), Oisin Grehan and Jeffrey Snover (Microsoft)

Resource

• Windows PowerShell Cookbook – Lee Holmes
• New PowerShell Graphical Help File (Version 2)– with support for CTP
  • Seems to crash on exit–Hal emailed The Scripting Guys, hopefully they’ll fix it.
• Ebook that covers the CTP available November 12th (Brandon told us after we finished recording that this ebook is available now)
• PowerShell TFM 3rd Edition by Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks –
• Jeffery’s deck from TechEd “What’s New for Developers in PowerShell V2”

Tips

• More VMWare scripting: Invoke-VmCommand.ps1from Brandon
  • List VMs and processes, execute arbitrary commands.
• Talk about Switch -regex and Brandon’s perfect exampleof a useful custom object
  • Why write a wrapper for this existing utility? (hbainfo)
  • Using Switch -regex to process text
• Marcus asks (and he blogged about it),
  • “How can I fix formatting on a free-form street address field stored in my AD? Can posh help with an output where … for example, address is split into multiple lines? Like this:
    “400 crap rd,
    suite 150”
  • Ended up using calculated properties to get the results into a table easily:
    $a | format-table displayname,samaccountname, @{
    Label =”Street Address” ; Expression = {
    $_.streetaddress -replace”`n”,” ” } }

Thanks for listening! We love feedback and news tips, you can send them to powerscripting@gmail.com. Join our Facebook group “PowerScripting Podcast”.