PowerShell Team
Automating the world one-liner at a time…
Latest posts
Hosting PowerShell in a GUI – the Movie
You've just got to stop and take 4 minutes to watch David Aiken's demonstration of how easy it is to host PowerShell in a GUI. Seriously, it is a 4 minute video! Even if you aren't a developer, it is worth looking at so you understand the concept and the work involved and then you can use that to demand your vendors provide you this function! J (In all honesty, a bunch of you will see how easy it is and decide that you can do it yourself so give it a view). < Updating to include "this thingamajig called 'links'". Doh!!!!! "asdfasdf" - you should have included your real name - that one was worth taking credi...
Figuring Things Out
In my last blog entry, I showed how a script can get the directory it resides in. Jvierra commented: So being a team member doesn't make one know everything. Sad but true! The interesting thing about this is that at some point I knew this information but then I forgot it so I had to figure it out again. It reminded me of a 2 studies made of Unix Admins made about 20+ years apart that both reached the same conclusion. If you take a range of novice to expert Unix admins and put them in a class room and ask them a set of questions, there is a surprising small delta between the performances of these admins (it exi...
PowerShell Analyzer is Now Available for Purchase
Karl Prosser has been doing great things with PowerShell Analyzer for quite some time now and has finally decided to join forces with Dr. Tobias Weltner and go commercial with it. Given the amazing amount of time and creative thinking that Karl has put into this, I hope it goes very well for him. Tobias has been involved in the scripting space for years and had developed PowerShellIDE. Together, they have set up shop at http://PowerShellLive.Com which has lot of good scripting information and where you can now pre-order PowerShellIDE at ½ the selling price. You can read more details about the offer HERE. You can ...
Demo SQL Provider Code
Hi, Attached is the code we used today in the Web cast for the SQL demo provider. Please note this is not a SQL management provider. It simply allows you to query data from a SQL server directly from the cmd line. Install the Snapin: PS>$env:Windir\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0\.50727\InstallUtil.exe SQLProvider.dll Add the snapin to your session: PS>Add-PsSnapin SqlPrototypeProvider You can use it as follows: PS>cd SQL: SQL:>cd MySQLServer SQL:>dir master tempdb model msdb pubs Northwind SQL:>cd Northwind SQL:>dir name ---- Categories CustomerCustomerDemo CustomerDemographics Customers dt...
Using a DSL to generate XML in PowerShell
A while back, Jeffrey posted an article on how to use string expansion and XML casts to build XML documents in-line in a PowerShell script: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/05/29/using-powershell-to-generate-xml-documents.aspx The overall feel of the approach that Jeffrey described is very much like that of ASP, JSP, PHP on any of the other systems that use “holes” to embed code to dynamically generate document content within the document itself. Ari over at the Windows Core Networking blog had some concerns about this approach for various reasons. You can see his comments at: http://blogs.msdn.co...
WMI, PowerShell – How well do they gel?
< Kapil Mathur is in the process of learning PowerShell to work with WMI and wrote up his findings to date – jps> Automating admin scenarios using PowerShell The preferred scripting language for the WMI world has been vbscript. But if you are a windows administrator writing WMI scripts, chances are that you have been hearing another name lately- PowerShell. To compare the scripting experience in between the two, I tried out my hand at automating some admin scenarios by converting "vbscript" scripts into "PowerShell" scripts. I took two scripts from Alain Lissoir's book "Leveraging Windows Management Instrume...
Registration-Free AD Cmdlets
In Dmitry's PowerBlog, he said that one of the biggest complaints they got about their FREE AD Cmdlets was that you had to register to download them. Now you can download them directly without having to register. I must say that I've got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it reduces the friction associated with getting great a set of Cmdlets to the community and that is great. On the other hand, these Cmdlets are developed by Quest Software Corporation, not Quest Philanthropies. Being a commercial enterprise is a good thing. Being a corporation means that they bring in money which allows to them to hire...
TechEd Webcast Available – PowerShell: The Future of Server Administration
Last week Don Jones gave a great talk at TechEd: Microsoft Windows PowerShell: The Future of Server Administration. Here is the abstract: Windows PowerShell is Microsoft's next generation command line scripting solution which combines the interactivity of KSH or BASH, the programmability of Perl or Ruby and the production-orientation of AS400 CL or VMS DCL. Come and learn about the basic capabilities of Windows PowerShell as an interactive shell environment and a rich scripting engine and how it can be used to highlight and exploit the manageability improvements in Windows Server codename "Longhorn." This was ...
Ben Pearce’s Top 5 PowerShell Questions
Ben Pearce manned the PowerShell booth at Tech Ed 2007 in Orlando and posed the top 5 questions he got HERE. Here are they are (navigate to the link to find the answers! J ): How can I learn PowerShell Can I script active directory? Does PowerShell work against remote hosts? Does PowerShell install on Windows 2008 Server Core? Can I call PowerShell Cmdlets from my own custom app? Ben – thanks for doing a great job manning the booth! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows Management Partner Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCe...