PowerShell Benefits Over COM Scripting

PowerShell TeamJanuary 31, 2007Jan 31, 200701/31/07

On an internal email thread, someone asked Vivek Sharma why they should implement PowerShell. They knew that PowerShell provided scripting but they had a COM interface which already gave them scripting so the question was – what, if any, were the additional benefits to doing PowerShell. Vivek gave a great answer that I thought I would shar

PowerShell Cheat Sheet – Now in XPS

PowerShell TeamJanuary 30, 2007Jan 30, 200701/30/07

I originally published Ben Pearce's PowerShell Cheat sheet in Word 2007 format. Given that I posted it a week before the Office 2007 launch, it turned out that not many people could read that so I posted it in PDF format as well. It now turns out that the corporate direction is to use XPS (I'm told that XPS viewers are readily available). A

Virtual Machine Manager’s PowerShell Support

PowerShell TeamJanuary 29, 2007Jan 29, 200701/29/07

One of the cornerstone features of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is PowerShell. They have built their entire GUI layered on top of PowerShell in the same way that Exchange 2007 did. A little while ago, I talked to Rakesh Malhotra (the Group Program Manager for SCVMM) about how things were going and he was very pleased with th

Windows PowerShell 1.0 for Windows Vista

PowerShell TeamJanuary 29, 2007Jan 29, 200701/29/07

As Jeffery promised to you folks, today we have offically released Windows PowerShell 1.0 for Microsoft Windows Vista. Thanks to everyone for patiently waiting for this release. To download Windows PowerShell 1.0 for Windows Vista, please visit the following links: For more details, please visit the following links: Enjoy Windows Vis

Working With WMI Events

PowerShell TeamJanuary 28, 2007Jan 28, 200701/28/07

PowerShell V1 does not provide native support for WMI events. That doesn't mean that you can't use WMI events with PowerShell, it just means that you need to leverage the .NET classes to do so. This falls into the category of "to ship is to choose". Here is a function that you can use to work with WMI events. This function takes a WMI class na

Executive Demo

PowerShell TeamJanuary 25, 2007Jan 25, 200701/25/07

I was in an executive review today where a team was demonstrating their technology (don't ask for details, I won't provide any :-) ).  At some point they brought up this beautiful graphic showing the geographic distribution of resources and then the graph was changing based upon the state of the resources.  We were all drooling like

Controlling PowerShell Function (Re)Definition

PowerShell TeamJanuary 25, 2007Jan 25, 200701/25/07

A question came up in the PowerShell news group recently where someone was asking how they could prevent functions from being redefined.  There are a couple of approaches you can use. First you can make functions read-only or constant. This is pretty straight-forward but does have some downsides. The other approach is to check to see if the

NetCmdlets Beta 2 is now Available.

PowerShell TeamJanuary 25, 2007Jan 25, 200701/25/07

nsoftware has released Beta 2 of NetCmdlet, a PowerShell snapin which provides Cmdlets for a wide range of protocols.   The following is from their Release Notes: New In Beta 2 The current release is packed with new features, new functionality, and new Cmdlets for network management and Internet Communications. The following is an s