PowerShell Team
Automating the world one-liner at a time…
Latest posts
The Semantic Gap
There are 2 worlds: The difference between these two is what is called the semantic gap. Our industry has been struggling with the semantic gap for decades. An excellent example of the semantic gap is provided by the TechProsaic blog entry: VMWare Perl Toolkit verses Powershell V1 ToolKit which shows the 20 lines of Perl required to do the same as the Get-VM cmdlet. Someone could read this blog and walk away thinking, "PowerShell is great and Perl is crap" - you'd be both right and wrong. PowerShell is great but Perl is not crap. (Hats off to superstar Larry W...
New (French) PowerShell Book Available
This is the first PowerShell book to be available in French. Details available HERE. Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows Management Partner Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
10 Cool things you can do with Windows PowerShell
Check out Jody Gilberts TechRepublic's article HERE. It is a surprisingly eclectic list. It shows that she's been kicking the tires. I can wait to see what else she comes up with. I especially liked her caveat: Note: Be careful, very careful Yes, this is a tool worthy of the name. PowerShell can easily cause massive configuration changes, positive or negative — so protect yourself and establish a test environment for your learning experiences. Also consider using the “-confirm” parameter to test configurations before execution for certain commands. Or as Peter Parker learne...
Scripting Games 2008
The Scripting Guys have REALLY upped their game with this year's Scripting Games 2008 being held between Feb 15 and march 3rd. This year you can submit scripts in either VBScript, Perl or PowerShell. They have an amazing brochure describing the event in full color downloadable HERE. Sign up and show that what you can do with PowerShell! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows Management Partner Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh...
"The smile starts with PowerShell…"
Peter Varhol of RedmondMag.Com has a very good look at Windows Server 2008 HERE. He does a good job covering some of the points of a very large release. He has some particularly kind words for PowerShell. Here the start of that section: "The quality of the release is directly related to the quality of tools provided to nurse it through its daily chores. In this regard, Windows Server 2008 might just bring a smile to all the overworked admins out there. The smile starts with PowerShell, the widely reported replacement to the NT command script workhorse in use for over a decade." ...
Advanced PowerShell
At ITForum, I had a blast giving the session: Advanced Windows PowerShell Scripting. In previous conferences, I tried to have talks that everyone could come to and get something out of. That worked well a the beginning but I began to get feedback that beginners didn't like it when we went deep and advanced users didn't like it if we didn't. In this conference, I decided to have a session dedicated to people that know PowerShell well and want to go deep. I was so concerned about beginners in the session getting frustrated that I warned people about a dozen times (way overboard!). This sess...
Online PowerShell Training
Sapien is considering offering PowerShell Training online. They have a survey asking about potential ways to deliver the training. Complete the survey and you'll be entered into a contest to win a free slot in their first training session. The contest ends in 2 weeks. You can get more details HERE and take the survey HERE. Enjoy! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows Management Partner Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh...
Tab Completion
Did you realize that you can use Wildcards with our tab completion? At the very beginning of the project, we had long discussions about whether it should be "Verb-Noun" or "Noun-Verb". One of the arguments for NOUN-VERB was that it was better for tab completion. We expected a TON of nouns but only a few verbs. As such, if you type VERB-<TAB>, you'd see a ton of things to choose from. Alternatively, if you typed NOUN-<TAB>, you'd only see the VERBS that apply to that noun. That wasn't a good enough reason to go NOUN-VERB. In the end, we w...
Lightweight Performance Testing with PowerShell
When you write a script, a few possible concerns may be going through your mind: · Does my Script do what I want it to? · Can the script be read and understood by other people? · Is the script efficient? The answers to one and two can be very subjective, so today I’ll help you figure out how to make your script efficient. More precisely, I will help you to figure out the most efficient of a few different ways you can do something in Powershell. ...