PowerScripting Podcast Episode 21, "One-half of Jeffrey Snover"

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

In This Episode

This week, our Intrepid Heroes talk about News in the PowerShell world, bring you fresh Resources from the wild Internet, and share their experiences in the Tips section, with you, the Listener. Oh–and we also interview JEFFREY SNOVER! In case you don’t know who he is, he’s basically like the Thomas Edison of scripting.

Interview with Jeffrey Snover

And now a word from our sponsor:

Our interview today is brought to you by Quest Software. Quest LOVES PowerShell. Go to www.quest.com / PowerShell and download their free graphical user interface, script editor and Active Directory commands. While you’re there, join their online community where you can share ideas and get free useful commands.  Visit www.quest.com / powershell today!

Be sure to listen to the show for the interview. You can read a list of the questions here. The interview ran really long (which is awesome), but at an hour and a half, it was too long for our format. So, we decided to split it into two main chunks.

There is stuff in this interview you have not heard anywhere else before, so check it out. Maybe some people don’t like it when Jeffrey talks so long, but we sure did.

News

• VMware has JUST released their VI Toolkit for PowerShell to the public. If you use ESX Server, you need to check it out.
• Great News! PowerShell Plus 1.0 has been released!
• Coming later this year: Managing VMWare with Windows PowerShell: TFM®! to be published by Sapien Press.
• The Windows SDK team is seeking feedback on how important it would be to you (or not) to have a PowerShell-based build environment. Click on the link above to leave your comments.

Resources

Stay tuned, kids! We’ll be back after a brief message from our sponsors.

The resource section today is sponsored by SDM Software:
“SDM Software provides innovative solutions that combine PowerShell
and Group Policy to help reduce the complexity of managing your
Windows systems. Their unique GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for
PowerShell, provides the means to automate the management of your
Group Policy Objects. To get more information about these products and download trial copies, visit sdmsoftware.com/powerscripting.php.”

• We’ve been reading Andy’s Get-PowerShell (get-powershell.com) blog lately, cool stuff, you should check it out.
  • Andy’s post about Start a process
• VMware released a lab manual for their VI Toolkit with lots of examples.
• PowerShell Answers blog post - Custom object, custom formatting
• Dmitry from Quest covers a new feature in PowerGUI that converts VBScript to PowerShell.

Tips

The Tips are brought to you today by our friends at ShellTools.

Did you know that PowerShell Plus is a great XML editor? In addition to .PS1 files, you can also work with .PS1XML help files and .PSC PowerShell Console files. Other new features include a really cool console preview pane in the editor which makes edit/test/correct workflow very easy. You can download it today at shelltools.com.

• Some notable built-in aliases you might not have noticed:
  • diff -> compare-object
  • group -> group-object
  • iex -> invoke-expression
  • ii -> invoke-item
  • sleep -> start-sleep
  • sort -> sort-object
  • kill -> stop-process
• We discuss a forum post which asks, “How can I verify a URL redirection?” We answer the question using the System.Net.HttpWebRequest .NET object.(from powershellcommunity.org)
• Assign multiple variables in one expression (Get-PowerShell blog). Andy gets all the air time today.

One-liner

This one-liner lets you quickly make a GUID (globally unique identifier):

write ([string][guid]::NewGuid())

Also don’t forget to check our blog from time-to-time, we like to post little tidbits in-between shows like one-liners so don’t miss out! Hal just posted a PowerShell kitchen timer one-liner today.

Thanks for listening! You can send feedback to powerscripting@gmail.com.

Episode 21 coming soon.

I just wanted to let you know that the new podcast should be posted by Tuesday morning. We had a great interview with Jeffery Snover that you don’t want to miss!

One-Liner: Countdown Timer in PowerShell

Here’s a quick one for ya. Perfect kitchen timer. Who doesn’t have a laptop with PowerShell on it in their kitchen?

start-sleep (60*9); write-host ("`a"*4)

Start-Sleep works in seconds, so you see where I’ve done some quick
math to get nine minutes. Not sure if the ()’s were required, but they
don’t hurt. I didn’t know the precedence of parameter parsing versus
multiplication off the top of my head. Next is Write-Host with some
more multiplication. This one uses “`a” which is the special character
which emits a beep (old schoolers know this as the ASCII code for
BELL). If you multiply a string by a number in this way (and in this
order, actually), then posh concatenates it the number of times you
specify. Due to the magical parsing that PowerShell does, if you were
to try this the other way around, with the 4 first, you would get an
error when it tries to convert “`a” to an INT.

Happy Powershelling!

One-liner: Pop up a message box

You could paste this into a scheduled task or something if you want an annoying reminder to pop up on your screen.  :)  Now if only schtasks.exe was as easy to use as PowerShell…

PowerShell -NoProfile -NonInteractive -Command [reflection.assembly]::loadwithpartialname(’system.windows.forms’); [system.Windows.Forms.MessageBox]::show(’reminder: buy milk’)

PowerScripting Podcast - Episode 20

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

Please visit our sponsors!

• ShellTools Software - makers of PowerShell Plus and PowerShell Analyzer
• SDM Software - “Windows Group Policy Management Simplified.” Featuring the GPExpert Scripting toolkit for PowerShell

News

• Don Jones gives us a peek at his PowerShell column in the March Technet Magazine:
  • “March is Progress Reporting - a definitive look at when, why, and how to use Write-Progress to produce
    scripts that run for a long time, but don’t look hung.”
• Sapien will be announcing their PowerShell training plans very soon.  Watch their blog.  They are also seeking input on a possible PowerShell developer class, you can fill out the survey here.
• Jeffery Snover will be joining us on a future podcast so send in your questions

Resources

• RunAs Radio recently featured our very own PowerShell MVP Marco Shaw on their podcast show #46 to talk about WMI and IIS7 and several other things.
• SDM Software has updated their freeware SDM GPMC snapin to version 1.1.
  • Now includes 16 cmdlets for managing group policy objects
  • New cmdlet Update-SDMGP which can be used to trigger remote GP refreshes using PoSh.
  • Their commercial product, GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell, has also undergone revisions lately, check it out.
• Special Operations Software has just posted a video on their website made by Darren Mar-Elia (the GPO Guy) where he talks about Specops Command: http://www.specopssoft.com/powershell/specopscommand-sdm.wmv
• The guys over at the Swiss IT Pro & Technet blog have published a second free PowerShell e-book.  Written by Frank Koch, this 78-page book covers a wide variety of topics.  It is available in both German and English, and the zip archive contains parts one and two in PDF format. Thanks to listener Rob Johnston for the tip.

Tips

• Object Types and Custom Formatting - below links were compiled by Shay in #Powershell

• How does Powershell formatting really work?
• Finding out what determines which properties are displayed
• Extending Object Types and Formatting (msdn)
• Use of wildcards in Powershell formatting
• Customizing Windows PowerShell

• Using the -disabled, -enabled and -LdapFilter parameters of the Get-Qaduser command to speed up searches

• Newsgroup Posts:
  • using AutoItX COM interface
  • PS and WinRM on 1000+ machines

Cmdlet of the Week

• measure-command

One-liner

• This simple one-liner is an easy to use stopwatch!

measure-command { read-host “press any key to stop timer” }

Thanks for listening!

Windows 2008 Server launch event in Atlanta

If you are going, let us know via the event I just created in Facebook.  Details are in the link.

PowerScripting Podcast - Episode 19

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

Listen:

News

• Scripting Games now open by the time you hear us!
• Citrix Workflow Studio“Workflow Studio, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, is an IT process automation solution that enables you to compose, integrate and orchestrate rule-based workflows across your application delivery infrastructure. Workflow Studio acts as the glue across the IT infrastructure allowing administrators to easily tie technology components together via workflows that enable the system to truly operate as a dynamic delivery platform.”
• Jeff’s Scripting Blog and More: Practical PowerShell Jeff Hicks is writing a new monthly column for a new eJournal from RealTime Publishers. “The column, Practical PowerShell, will be a regular feature in Windows Administration in Realtime. The eJournal is a free PDF although I think you have to give up an email address.”
• Windows PowerShell : The Semantic Gap There are 2 worlds: 1. The world as we think about it. 2. The world as we can manipulate it. The difference between these two is what is called the semantic gap.

Resources

• 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.

Cmdlets

• Export-Clixml
• Import-Clixml

Tips

• Newsgroup post from Hal:
  • gscanga writes about his frustration that PowerShell cannot do anything remotely
• Managing Terminal Services attributes with PowerShell « Dmitry’s PowerBlog: PowerShell and beyond Terminal Services properties is definitely a set of properties you would want to bulk-manage, and as we all know PowerShell is the best tool for any bulk operations.
• 10 Cool Things You Can Do with PowerShell - I got this from ‘Entwickler’ on Twitter.  Some examples:

1. Report all of the USB devices installed
2. Background a time-consuming task

• From Lee Holmes (who is on the PowerShell team) on his Precision Computing blog: Realtime Syntax Highlighting in your PowerShell Console. Thanks Mark aka ‘meson’ for the tip.

Thanks for listening!

PowerScripting Podcast - Episode 18 "Win Fabulous Prizes!"

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.

PowerScripting Podcast - Episode 17 - With “The Scripting Guys!”

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!

Interviews

We’ve been doing a lot of interview and guest shows lately.  I just wanted to let you all know that with one or two exceptions, we’ve interviewed all the people we really wanted to get on the show, and we’ll definitely getting back to the more meaty shows in the future.

Once we get the last bit of interviews done, I imagine from time to time we’ll still have guests on the show, but it’ll be less of a focus and more of a complement.  And spaced between these, we will have more interviews when the occasion warrants.  For example if a big release of some cool software we like happens, we might have the developer on the show.

Show 17 has already been recorded, so once we (and by we I mean Jonathan) get the editing done that’ll get posted.  It’s an interview show, I think you’ll like it.  We were really pleased that they deigned to talk to us mere mortals. 

Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to send us feedback–we like to hear from you!