Episode 19 – The Scripting Games are on

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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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 ](http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/msh/cmdlets/export-clixml.mspx)

Episode 18 – Win Fabulous Prizes!

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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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:

Episode 17 – With "The Scripting Guys!"

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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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:

• 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!

Episode 16 – Don gives us the Scripting Answers

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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In This Episode

• Special guest this episode is scripting guru Don Jones, the well-known author of several books, presenter and trainer at conferences and in webcasts and a lot more.
• Several interesting tips for your scripting

Resources

• We go into the history of PowerShellCommunity.org and future plans for the site. We also go into detail on the sections of the website and the mission of the non-profit organization behind it all.
• Don gives the last holdouts a really hard sell for learning PowerShell.

Tips

• Huddledmasses.org: Editing Media Tags from PowerShell
  • This started out as a question on the #PowerShell IRC channel (irc.freenode.net) about how to edit tags on mp3 files, but we quickly discovered TagLib#, which lets you access and edit tags on not only mp3s, but on everything from asf and avi to wma…
• PowerShell Team: Supporting -Whatif, -Confirm, -Verbose ““ In SCRIPTS!
  • J. Snover: “This is a super-important issue so you should definitely start using this in your scripts that you share with others (that have side effects on the system). Please try it out and blog about it to others so that it becomes a community norm.”
• $cript Fanatic: Creating and managing processes in PowerShell
  • Shay covers several ways to create and manage processes. WMI, .NET and more. Good stuff.

We ran long with Don, so combined with the slow news cycle for the holidays we just skipped the news this time.
Don’t forget–we love feedback. In particular we’d like to know if you like the guests, or do you like more of the one vs. one approach? It’s a lot of fun to have guests on the show and to do the special interviews and segments. Please let us know if this is getting to be too much or any other thoughts you may have. If you have ideas on guests you’d like to hear, let us know.
Ways to interact with us:

Specops Command Webinar

Corey from Special Operations Software wrote to let us know about a webinar demo of Specops Command that’s coming up next week. Here’s the details:

I wanted to let you know about a webinar we will be doing every Tuesday 1PM EST on the Specops Command “PowerShell Remoting through Group Policy”. Here are the meeting details if you are interested:
Click here to add the meeting to your calendar.

Episode 15 – Joel Bennett, for the developers in the house

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
Listen: [][1]

In This Episode

• Special guest this episode, Joel Bennett aka “Jaykul” from [HuddledMasses.org][2]
• “The Developer Show”
• New software releases, interviews, other goodies

News

• [AD Cmdlets RTM][3] (Dmitry"™s PowerBlog)“We kind of kept sticking to the fashion of perpetual betas for quite some time now (since the first 1.0 beta released late March through the RC 1.0.5 this fall) and we feel that the product is now feature rich and stable enough…”
• [Windows PowerShell Holiday Gift Guide: Books][4] (Technet Scripting Center)“The Scripting Guys present their first-ever Windows PowerShell Holiday Gift Guide. In this inaugural gift guide we survey some of the best PowerShell software, script editors, cmdlets, and add-ins that money can buy.”
• [An Interview with Lee Holmes][5] (Technet Scripting Center)“Lee Holmes is a developer on the Windows PowerShell team and author of the new book Windows PowerShell Cookbook (which includes a foreword written by Scripting Guy Dean Tsaltas).”
• [An Interview with Lee Holmes][6] (A Couple of Admins Podcast)
• [Cisco opening up IOS][7] (Network World)“Cisco’s plan to open up its venerable IOS routing software to customers and third-party developers is a bold move designed to further the company’s push to make the network the epicenter of the virtual data center.”

Resources

• [Expresso Regular Expression Development Tool][8]Very cool tool to create regexes.  Free registration required.[][8]

Tips

• Discussion on an email from listener John Cook:

“I’m a programmer, so I don’t find PowerShell (or VBScript etc.) difficult as a language. What I find difficult about scripting is scripting itself, such as recognizing when it’s worth the effort to write a script. I’m a big fan of scripting, but I don’t write a lot of scripts because I don’t think to do it. Or I’m doing something that’s not repetitive enough to script.
I would find it interesting to listen to a show about scripting strategy: organizing tasks so they can be scripted, etc.
I would also find it interesting to hear a discussion about testing scripts. I’m a fan of test-driven development, but scripts are hard to test. Scripts are full of side effects: creating or deleting files, setting properties, sending email, etc.”

Listen Now Direct Link

Manipulating the Registry with PowerShell

In case you missed it, back in October, Shay wrote a cool set of functions for working with the registry. Here’s the list:
Get-RegBinary
Get-RegDWord
Get-RegDefault
Get-RegExpandString
Get-RegMultipleString
Get-RegQuadWord
Get-RegString
Get-RegValueKind
New-RegSubKey
Remove-RegSubKey
Remove-RegSubKeyTree
Set-RegBinary
Set-RegDWord
Set-RegDefault
Set-RegExpandString
Set-RegMultipleString
Set-RegQuadWord
Set-RegString
Test-RegSubKey
Test-RegValue
Go read his article as it explains the syntax and gives a bunch of samples. Very useful stuff!

Episode 14 – The IDEs are getting better

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
Listen:

In This Episode

• News: Software updates, books, PS Virtual User Group (recording will be available)
• In Resources, we’ll tell you about an interview with Jeffrey Snover, and several pieces of software.
• Cmdlet of the Week: New-Object
• In Tips, we’ll talk about Hal’s recent blog post involving benchmarking
• We’ve got a one-liner with a GUI.
• Gotchas about WMI
• Thanks for feedback from: Mace, John Cook, Justin Stokes

News

• PowerShell + is now free for non-commercial use!
• PowerShell TFM (2nd Edition)to be available soon - May be available already from the Sapien site
  • Don says Sapien tends to run some insane deals on New Years Eve so it may be worth watching out for that
• PowerShell Virtual User Group meeting #2 was Dec 4th - This was the second virtual event.  Speakers were: Don Jones (MVP), Dmitry Sotnikov (MVP), Oisin Grehan and Jeffrey Snover (Microsoft).  Recording is supposed to be available, but as of this moment, Hal can’t find a darn thing about it.  Watch Marco’s blog and PowerShellCommunity.org.

Resources

• Jeffery Snover interview at IT Forum (video from PodTech)
• Admin Script Editorfrom ITripoli
  • Hal and Jonathan currently evaluating–looks extremely cool.
• PowerGUI - Version 1.0.12 released, now includes a debugger and more.  Don’t forget the known issues and patch to work with the CTP.
• SpecOps Command- use Group Policy to deploy and manage PowerShell scripts
  • Can deploy PowerShell itself using GPO–as well as your favorite snapins!
  • Includes new cmdlets
  • All operations that you can perform from the administrative user interfaces you can perform from PowerShell.

Cmdlet of the week

• New-Object
  • Creates an instance of a .Net or COM object.
  • Examples:

new-object -comobject InternetExplorer.Application  new-object -comobject "Shell.Application" * Also see Appendix E of the new book Windows PowerShell Cookbook

Episode 13 – //o// and Marc give us an ITForum report

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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This is a special episode. //o// (ThePowerShellGuy) joins us to give a report on ITForum in Barcelona. Marc tells us about some of the sessions he attended and people he met. I will be adding links in the coming days.

Thanks for listening!