Dmitry Sotnikov’s view on PowerShell, PowerGUI and everything he sees around
Here’s Sean’s newest crazy PowerShell video in which he managed to feature your’s truly doing moonwalk (or trying to 
)
As you can see from the video – Microsoft MVP Summits are a lot of fun with amazingly smart and crazy people around.
No more one off IT management. Just Script It!
In my current company (Jelastic) we have something happening to us all the time: latest blog posts, awards, media mentions, etc. We are doing a decent job pushing these to various social media, but I also wanted to get these to my contacts in Skype (Skype gives you the ability to set your status text in your profile).
Below is the PowerShell v3 script that I wrote today to do that! 
It takes the latest item from my blog and twitter feed, sees which of them is fresher, and (unless the tweet is just my reply to someone) pushes that to Skype (the property is called MoodText).
Here’s the script:
###################################################
# Set-SkypeStatusText.ps1
# Gets latest post from RSS feed (e.g. blog) and Twitter
# Picks whichever is the latest and sets it as status text (MoodText) in Skype
# (unless the latest tweet is a reply)
#
# NOTE: On x64 boxes, use PowerShell x86 (for Skype compat)
#
##################################################
# (c) 2012 - Dmitry Sotnikov
##################################################
# Customize these for yourself
$myblog = "http://blog.jelastic.com/feed/"
$myTwitterHandle = "DSotnikov"
# Get the blog feed
$blogFeed = Invoke-RestMethod $myblog
# Get the twitter feed
$twitterFeed = Invoke-RestMethod `
"https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=$myTwitterHandle"
# If twitter is more recent and not a reply (does not start with @) use it
if (($twitterFeed[0].pubDate -gt $blogFeed[0].pubDate) -and
($twitterFeed[0].description[$myTwitterHandle.Length+2] -ne "@")){
$latestPost = $twitterFeed[0].description.Substring($myTwitterHandle.Length+2)
} else {
$latestPost = "$($blogFeed.Item(0).title): $($blogFeed.Item(0).link)"
}
# Set the status in twitter
$skype = New-Object -ComObject Skype4Com.Skype
$skype.CurrentUserProfile.MoodText = $latestPost
Now if you want to have this happen automatically you can just schedule it using Windows Task Scheduler.
Important:
Remember how in PowerShell v1 and v2 we used to have to create Internet Explorer object each time we wanted to parse HTML page? This kind of works but has a few inconveniences such as having to insert Start-Sleep every now and then because IE can be busy and fail if you request too much from it too quickly.
In PowerShell v3, for web pages, things become much easier. Just do:
$p = Invoke-WebRequest "http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com"
And $p.ParsedHtml.body will let you iterate though all web page elements!
However, there is a scenario in which you will have to revert to the old IE ways – local files. If the HTML file is on your local disk, $p will not have the ParsedHtml property. And you will have to use the IE COM object like you did in earlier versions of PowerShell:
$ie = new-object -com "InternetExplorer.Application"
# The easiest way to accomodate for slowness of IE
Start-Sleep -Seconds 1
$ie.Navigate("D:\SavedPage.htm")
# The easiest way to accomodate for slowness of IE
Start-Sleep -Seconds 1
$ParsedHtml = $ie.Document
Happy scripting!
Here’s another great recording from previous PowerShell Deep Dive – Brandon‘s session on module design. Brandon has experience designing PowerShell modules for Splunk and other companies – so there’s a lot to learn from him!
In this session we will deep dive into the thought process behind production module design. The presenter will explain the reason for choices made for the Splunk Module and his own BSonPosh module.
This is a live recording from European TEC 2011 PowerShell Deep Dive conference. See more PowerShell Deep Dive recordings here.
By the way, TEC US is just around the corner – April 29 – May 2, 2012 in San Diego. The agenda has already been published and is absolutely fantastic.
Register now - this is the best PowerShell event you can find!
A couple of weeks ago we posted a job opening on LinkedIn (were looking for a person to be in charge of our Jelastic‘s professional services), and it turned out that while LinkedIn jobs attract a lot of applications, the site itself does not make it easy to process them afterwards. You get CVs in email, and they also post a list of applicants with email addresses, phone numbers, titles, etc. – but there is no way to export the list to, say, Excel. In our case, we really wanted to have the data exported, so we could jointly work on a shared spreadsheet and everyone involved could grade each applicant and add notes to the table.
Being a PowerShell guy, I wrote the script below that does the scraping for me. Basically, I just saved the page with the list of applicants to my local disk and found that in their html, each applicant information is contained in vcard element, which has class name with LinkedIn URL and the actual name, and then elements with email and phone number:
So all my script has to do is: create an IE object and then use it to find the corresponding fields, then create custom objects from them, add them to the collection, and export it to CSV. Here’s the code – hope it helps you solve similar tasks when other sites do not provide good export capabilities:
$ie = new-object -com "InternetExplorer.Application"# The easiest way to accomodate for slowness of IEStart-Sleep -Seconds 1$ie.Navigate("D:\Temp\LinkedIn.htm")# The easiest way to accomodate for slowness of IEStart-Sleep -Seconds 1$doc = $ie.Document# Get a collection of vcard elements$cards = $doc.body.getElementsByClassName("vcard")# This will be our collection of parsed objects$processesCards = @()# Iterate through the collectionfor ($i=0; $i -lt $cards.length; $i++) {$itm = $cards.item($i)# Get the 'name' element that has the applicant name and URL$name = $itm.getElementsByClassName("name").item(0).getElementsByTagName("a").item(0)# If you want you can output the name to the screen# so you know where you are$name.outerText# Get the phone number and email address$phone = $itm.getElementsByClassName("phone").item(0)$email = `$itm.getElementsByClassName("trk-applicant-email").item(0)# Below is PowerShell v3 notation.# In v2, replace '[pscustomobject]' with# 'new-object psobject -Property'$obj = [pscustomobject] @{"name"=$name.outerText;"url"=$name.href;"email"=$email.outerText;"phone"= $phone.outerText }$processesCards += $obj}# Export to CSV - which you can open in Excel$processesCards | Export-Csv D:\Temp\linkedin.csv
Here’s recording of @alexandair – PowerShell MVP, constrained runspaces guru and editor of PowerShell Magazine – talking about delegation in PowerShell remoting. I bet not that many of you tried this feature before – so check out this talk that Aleksandar did at the last PowerShell Deep Dive in Frankfurt!
In this session you will learn how to set up a fan-in PowerShell endpoint, and then use it to assign specific administrative tasks to the appropriate users and groups without changing the membership of local Administrators group. By using just the IIS configuration files and PowerShell scripts we will enable dynamic creation of customized automation environments.
This is a live recording from European TEC 2011 PowerShell Deep Dive conference. See more PowerShell Deep Dive recordings here.
By the way, TEC US is just around the corner – April 29 – May 2, 2012 in San Diego. The agenda has already been published and is absolutely fantastic.
Register now - this is the best PowerShell event you can find!
Here’s recording of @jeffhicks – PowerShell MVP, book author and trainer – Jeffery Hicks – talking at the previous PowerShell Deep Dive about how you can turn existing command-line utilities into PowerShell functions so they can become first-class (object emitting ) PowerShell citizens.
You can find Jeff’s slides and demo scripts here.
The abstract and video recording are below:
PowerShell is everywhere but there are still many command line tools in the IT Pro’s toolbox, In this session we’ll look at how to turn just about any command line based tool into a PowerShell tool so that you can incorporate it into your PowerShell scripts and daily management tasks. The power of objects in the pipeline is amazing and there’s no reason not to include tools like NETSTAT.EXE or NBTSTAT.EXE.
1. The Challenge of CLI Tools
2. Console Text to PowerShell Objects Techniques
3. Putting It All Together
This is a live recording from European TEC 2011 PowerShell Deep Dive conference. See more PowerShell Deep Dive recordings here.
By the way, TEC US is just around the corner – April 29 – May 2, 2012 in San Diego. The agenda has already been published and is absolutely fantastic.
Register now - this is the best PowerShell event you can find!
See @rsiddaway / Richard Siddaway (PowerShell MVP and the founder of UK PowerShell usergroup) giving a great overview of PowerShell eventing in this recording from last year’s PowerShell Deep Dive.
Windows is an event driven system. PowerShell is the automation engine for the Microsoft platform. Version 2.0 introduced the ability to work with system events. Many system events do not require action on our part. There are some events that we really need to be aware of and act upon. Gaining access to these events has not been an easy task for the administrator — up until now.
PowerShell can work with events generated by:
• WMI
• .NET
• The PowerShell engine
Between them they give a handle into the inner workings of your system. A customizable, generic approach to handling events will be presented that enables you to perform actions based on the events detected. Events don’t just provide an insight into what’s happening. We can use them to trigger system actions for us — a self-healing system anyone
The key take aways from this session will be:
• The PowerShell event engine enables you to interact at a closer level with your system
• The consumption and processing of events can be as simple or complicated as you require
• You can use events to teach your system to react a fix things on its own
This is a live recording from European TEC 2011 PowerShell Deep Dive conference. See more PowerShell Deep Dive recordings here.
By the way, TEC US is just around the corner – April 29 – May 2, 2012 in San Diego. The agenda has already been published and is absolutely fantastic. 
Register now - this is the best PowerShell event you can find!
See @shaylevy and @poshoholic (PowerShell MVPs Shay Levy and Kirk Munro respectively) talk about PowerShell proxy functions and their open-source module PowerShell Proxy Extensions / PSPX that simplifies creating ones.
Here’s the abstract and the video – enjoy!
Join Shay Levy and Kirk Munro in this session as they take a deep dive into proxy functions in PowerShell. Shay and Kirk have been working together on PowerShell Proxy Extensions, a powerful module that leverages proxy functions and makes it easier than ever to create these powerful extensions to PowerShell. They will demonstrate what proxy functions are and why they are important, and then show how a little scripting savvy (and a really long script) can make your life easier by allowing you to create everything from very simple proxy functions that extend PowerShell to more complex proxy functions that override existing commands, fixing bugs and adding missing features at the same time, all while leveraging inline help as much as possible.
Video recording from PowerShell Deep Dive in Frankfurt. (I apologize for the sound quality, especially when Kirk starts to talk. I think they were using Kirk’s laptop – rather than mine – when showing that and it turned out that it did not have a good microphone.)
This is a live recording from European TEC 2011 PowerShell Deep Dive conference. See more PowerShell Deep Dive recordings here.
By the way, TEC US is just around the corner – April 29 – May 2, 2012 in San Diego. The agenda has already been published and is absolutely fantastic.
Register now - this is the best PowerShell event you can find!
Another day – another recording from PowerShell Deep Dive. For a change, this one is from a session delivered by yours truly. And it is on PowerShell jobs (also known as background jobs) and the functionality that they had in PowerShell 2.0 and are getting in PowerShell 3.0.
PowerShell jobs allow you to run your commands and scripts in the background without blocking your PowerShell. You can run multiple jobs, check their status, and collect results. We will also get a sneak peek of the new Jobs functionality coming in Windows 8!
This is a live recording from European TEC 2011 PowerShell Deep Dive conference. See more PowerShell Deep Dive recordings here.
By the way, TEC US is just around the corner – April 29 – May 2, 2012 in San Diego. The agenda has already been published and is absolutely fantastic.
Register now - this is the best PowerShell event you can find!
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