PowerShell Team
Automating the world one-liner at a time…
Latest posts
Windows Management Framework 4.0 is now available
Windows Management Framework 4.0, our package that lets you use management technologies from Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 on some of Microsoft’s older operating systems, is now available for you to download and install. This full-release version of Windows Management Framework 4.0 includes even more improvements than our Preview release. Be certain to read this blog post fully before installing, especially because WMF 4.0 is not compatible with certain versions of server products. Windows Management Framework 4.0 Preview was made publicly available in July, and we were very excited to talk with co...
PaaP: Windows PowerShell as a Platform – Part 1
In addition to being a scripting language, Windows PowerShell is also used as a platform in many applications. This is possible because the Windows PowerShell engine can be hosted inside an application. This blog post and the next will deal with the various APIs available for hosting Windows PowerShell in a C# application. The most important type for hosting Windows PowerShell is the System.Management.Automation.PowerShell class. This class provides methods that create a pipeline of commands and then execute those commands in a runspace. AddCommand Let's take a very simple example. Suppose you want to get th...
CIM Cmdlets – Some Tips & Tricks
Common Information Model (CIM) cmdlets have been around for a while, and come in handy when you are performing any CIM operation in PowerShell. They are easy to use, and provide a good user experience. In this blog post, I cover a few tips and tricks that can be useful for users of CIM cmdlets. To get started, let’s get the complete list of cmdlets. The PowerShell module name for these cmdlets is CimCmdlets, and we can use the Get-Command cmdlet to see the cmdlets exposed by this module. Tip#1: Working with CIM sessions A CIM session is a client-side object representing a connection to a loca...
DAL in action: Managing Network switches using PowerShell and CIM
This post is a part of the nine-part “What’s New in Windows Server & System Center 2012 R2” series that is featured on Brad Anderson’s In the Cloud blog. Today’s blog post covers management of network switches using CIM and WS-Man standards and how it applies to the larger topic of “Transform the Datacenter.” To read that post and see the other technologies discussed, read today’s post: “What’s New in 2012 R2: IaaS Innovations.” We described the role Cloud OS plays is managing the datacenter and the role the Datacenter Abstraction Layer (DAL) vision plays in enabling this on the DAL website lin...
DAL in Action: Introducing PCSV Cmdlets for Out-of-Band Management of Server Hardware
This post is a part of the nine-part “What’s New in Windows Server & System Center 2012 R2” series that is featured on Brad Anderson’s In the Cloud blog. Today’s blog post covers Out-Of-Band hardware management using new PCSVDevice cmdlets and how it applies to the larger topic of “Transform the Datacenter.” To read that post and see the other technologies discussed, read today’s post: “What’s New in 2012 R2: IaaS Innovations.” Windows Server is built from Cloud up to make it best Cloud OS. We believe that the issues running Clouds ...
PowerShell Sessions, Slides and Demos from TechEd 2013
We presented following sessions at this year’s edition of TechEd(s). At TechEd, we announced the newest feature in Windows PowerShell 4.0 – Desired State Configuration, so do check out the attached demos for it!! Desired State Configuration in Windows PowerShell Advance Automation using Windows PowerShell Windows PowerShell Unplugged Additionally, there were number of other sessions, hands-on-labs (HOLs) and instructor-led-labs (ILLs) showcasing various technology/product administration using of PowerShell automation. You can find those...
Windows Management Framework 4.0 Preview Now Available
With the availability of Windows 8.1 Preview and Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, we hope everyone has been enjoying our updates to Windows PowerShell and other management tools. We especially hope you’re having fun with our newest feature, Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration. Because we want as many people as possible to benefit from our work, we intend to release version 4.0 of Windows Management Framework (WMF) which will make this updated functionality in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 available on older operating systems. We are pleased to announce the first publicly available release...
Understanding PowerShell’s Type Conversion Magic
Type Conversion in PowerShell is, without question, one of the most useful ingredients in its "Magic Sauce" of administrator effectiveness. When you run a command with a specific parameter type (I.e.: a DateTime or a TimeSpan), things seem to "just work". For example, consider this recent question / info dump on Twitter: #PowerShell parameters that take a timespan object interpret 10 as 10 ticks, 10:00 as 10 hours, and "10" as 10 days. — June Blender (@juneb_get_help) June 6, 2013 But how? Here are the steps that PowerShell takes on your behalf to convert input to a given ty...
Microsoft Script Explorer: Next Steps
For those who are familiar with Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell, you know that we haven't released additional updates to it since we published the release candidate (RC) in August 2012. Over the past few months, we have been talking with customers and partners and taking a hard look at the adoption rate of the RC in terms of the number of downloads and the feedback we're received to date. One of the results of this analysis was that the adoption and usage of the pre-release versions of Script Explorer were not at the level we had hoped. Part of this stems from the fact that customers already have...