Happy New Year!!!

Just wanted to say Happy New PowerShell Year! We’ve come a long way in 2008 with PowerGUI downloads growing to impressive 200,000, PowerGUI.org forums becoming one of the primary places to get PowerShell assistance in the internet, PowerShell gaining industry adoption (with vendors like VMware jumping on board) and PowerGUI itself growing in functionality.

I want to say thank you to everyone who is helping PowerShell and PowerGUI success, and assure you that 2009 is going to be even bigger. We have quite a few PowerGUI and PowerShell projects on the way in my team, PowerShell itself with version 2 coming is going to take PowerShell on the next level, and even more companies adopting PowerShell in their products.

Welcome to 2009! You’re gonna like it here! 🙂

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Evan Dodds to present at TEC 2009

Just saw that Evan Dodds is on the Exchange track agenda with his Microsoft Windows PowerShell Scripting for Microsoft Exchange Server session.

Evan’s session are must-attend if you are managing Exchange and are interested in PowerShell. He is extremely knowledgeable (no surprise here – he is one of the key guys designing Exchange PowerShell implementation ;)) and just a great speaker.

This is in addition to a few other PowerShell sessions at TEC which I reported earlier.

Registration and more details can obviously be found at the conference web site.

Tags: Conferences, DEC, Exchange, Exchange 2007, PowerShell
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Quest SQL Cmdlet References

We have significantly expanded our online reference wiki at wiki.powergui.org. In addition to PowerGUI and AD cmdlets documentation, it now has:

• SQL Discovery cmdlets reference – these let you scan network for SQL Server instances, save search results into baseline and export in different formats.
• Change Director for SQL Server cmdlets reference – automated solution for managing schema changes to SQL Server databases.
• Capacity Manager for SQL Server cmdlets reference – generate capacity reports, send them via email, recalculate statuses and notify on capacity/fragmentation issues by email or by Windows Event Log, and so on.
• Log Reader cmdlets reference – I’ve already blogged about these here

I am not a SQL guy myself, but this surely looks like a very impressive addition to the cmdlets available out of the box with SQL.

Tags: PowerShell, SQL, cmdlets
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Virtualization PowerGUI Forum

Success has its consequences. 😉 VI Toolkit adoption seems to be skyrocketing as does PowerGUI’s Hyper-V, Citrix and VMware PowerPacks so more and more people want to discuss these, share ideas, or ask for help at the PowerGUI.org forums.

To provide space for these discussions we are opening Virtualization discussion forum at PowerGUI.org. And we even got Scott Herold – Quest’s Lead Architect of Virtualization Solutions – agreeing to be the host at the forum.

Whether you are into using PowerGUI and PowerShell to manage your virtualized environments, or just want to get started with this technology – this is the place you might want to check out from time to time. Or use RSS feed or email subscription for the forum to get every message posted there (which is what I have already set for myself! ;))

Tags: Citrix, Hyper-V, PowerGUI, PowerGUI.org, PowerShell, VMware
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PowerShell Christmas

May all your scripts be oneliners,
May your PSPath be with you wherever you go,
May jps leave comments on your blog,
May v2 come your way before you read my Xmas wishes next year. 😉

PowerGUI and CTP3

PowerShell team has just posted the latest pre-release drop of the upcoming version 2 – and they did in on track with the timeline they announced back in November.

The current version of PowerGUI (1.5.3) which you can download from PowerGUI.org is in general compatible with CTP3 but does have a few issues. For example, the editor works fine and you can get syntax highlight and intellisense for new cmdlets, but step-by-step debugging might leave awkward yellow marking on previous steps. 😉

These issues are obviously fully fixed in the upcoming 1.6 release which is coming out literally in a matter of days now. Stay tuned. 🙂

Tags: KB, Knowledge Base, Known Issues, PowerGUI, PowerShell, PowerShell v2
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VMware PowerPack 2.0.1

If you are managing VMware infrastructure there’s a new free tool for you – significantly revamped VMware Infrastructure Management pack for PowerGUI.

If you were ever using version 1 of the pack released earlier this year, then this new pack compares to v1 as a modern Boeing/Airbus jet would compare to what Wright brothers were flying back 1902. 😉

Seriously, v1 was basically myself hacking together a very basic pack based on a simple lab which I am using for my own software testing. v2 is a huge step forward. Kirk has carefully studied all the feedback we received, talked to folks at Vizioncore who have been leaders in VMware ecosystem for years now so they definitely know what VMware administration is, and designed a great new tool for VMware.

Read more about this PowerPack in Kirk’s post here.

One note: if you were among the first people downloading 2.0.0 starting Friday afternoon and before ~ 10 am GMT today, and if you had version1.x of that PowerPack on your machine before, please visit the page again and download 2.0.1 instead. It turned out that version 2.0.0 was not removing a few outdated links and actions from 1.x. 2.0.1 does.

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, VMware
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AD Forum Digest – Dec 12-19

Forums at PowerGUI.org really took off and now it’s kind of hard to keep an eye and each and every post there. Here’s my attempt to help you be up to speed with the coolest recent threads from just from one of the forums – Active Directory and PowerShell:

• Paul Chavez creating and assigning user principle name (UPN) on the fly in New-QADObject using in-string expressions and -ObjectAttributes.
• Jonathan Medd using server-side LDAP filtering to quickly find all expired accounts.
• Larry and Paul giving advice on how to set up connections to multiple domains and then use them within one script.
• Shay Levy on collecting all errors from your script execution and saving them to a file.
• The IF gotcha – if you use = (instead of -eq) in the IF condition PowerShell will assign new value there – not test the condition as you might want.
• File output gotcha: using out-file (or export-*) inside foreach-object block it will work for current object only – not the whole collection.
• Shay’s script on exporting AD group membership into csv files named using the original group names.

These are just a few select threads from just one forum. I obviously really recommend hanging around in the forums themselves to learn even more. 😉

Are digests like that useful? Would you like me to be posting them every now and then?

Tags: AD, AD cmdlets, Active Directory, PowerGUI, PowerGUI.org, PowerShell
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PowerGUI in multitenant environments

Here’s another cool example of how PowerGUI admin console can be customized to solve the tasks which no other tool can.

Chris is building tools for administrators in multi-tenant Active Directory environment. That means that one Active Directory is shared by multiple companies/departments/groups.

With native admin tools it is very hard to limit the views to just the subset a particular administrator needs – because they are normally limited to more or less the all or nothing approach. With PowerGUI things are much easier because you can easily change anything within the console.

With just one line changed Chris made PowerGUI’s AD PowerPack limit the view to a domain subtree specific to the administrator. And you can obviously easily slice the views in a different way – e.g. limit them by department, office, title, and so on.

Pretty powerful in modern environments and multi-tenant or delegated administration models! Check out our discussion thread here.

Tags: Active Directory, PowerGUI, PowerShell
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PowerGUI write-up at TechRepublic

Scott Lowe at TechRepublic has a quick write-up on PowerGUI and how it can be used to quickly develop PowerShell scripts.

He is basically concentrating on the script generation feature (PowerShell Code tab) of the PowerGUI admin console, and the built-in debugger in the PowerGUI Script Editor, as well as the vast platform supports from the PowerPack library.

Here’s his abstract:

PowerShell is an incredibly powerful scripting tool being included in just about all of Microsoft’s new products. With PowerShell, administrators can write scripts that just about completely manage all aspects of the software. PowerGUI, a free tool, is a great enhancement to PowerShell as it provides many of the benefits of a true development environment for those that want to quickly develop PowerShell scripts.

Check out the full review here.

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerShell, review
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