January 2011 PowerShell User Group Meeting
Published November 24, 2010Save the date - 11 January 2011 7.30 GMT
UK PowerShell User group presents a Live Meeting with Ed Wilson – THE Scripting Guy.
Ed will be talking about:
Windows PowerShell Best Practices
Learn Windows PowerShell best practices as they apply to each stage of the script development lifecycle. See the differences between working interactively from the Windows PowerShell prompt, writing an inline script, adding basic function, advanced functions and finally the implementation of Windows PowerShell Modules. What is a local best practice for Windows PowerShell development is not the same as a global best practice, and this talk covers those differences.
About Ed Wilson:
Ed Wilson, MCSE, MSCBA, MCT is the Microsoft Scripting Guy. As such, he writes the popular Hey Scripting Guy blog for Microsoft, speaks at conferences such as TechEd and TechReady. He is very active in the community and has spoken to numerous user groups around the world via Live Meeting and in person. Ed has written numerous books about VBScript, WMI, and Windows PowerShell scripting and his latest release is Windows PowerShell 2.0 Best Practices. In addition he wrote all the scripts for the Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 Resource kits. Ed lives in York, South Carolina and Ed has been with Microsoft since 2001. Prior to becoming the writer of the Hey Scripting Guy blog Ed taught scripting workshops worldwide to Microsoft Premier customers.
Live Meeting invites to follow
Manning book offer
Published November 23, 2010My publisher, Manning, have a 35-50% off offer running on ebooks between now and 1 December – check out www.manning.com
PowerShell in Practice for Christmas makes a great idea 
Visio Stencils
Published November 20, 2010If you are looking for Visio stencils – especially of a technical nature – check out Visio cafe - - http://www.visiocafe.com/
PAM 0.4
Published November 20, 2010PowerShell Admin Modules 0.4 is now available. This adds a PAMSysInfo module to the download that includes the following functions:
Get-BIOSInfo
Get-Bus
Get-CDROM
Get-ComputerSystem
Get-CPU
Get-MemIrq
Get-OSInfo
Get-PageFile
Get-System
Get-TimeZone
Get-SystemInfo is a top level function that calls the others for a full system information dump. All functions take a computer name as their only parameter.
PAMSysInfo isn’t complete but there is enough to start making it useful
Download from http://psam.codeplex.com/
Enjoy
SC Virtual Machine Manager
Published November 19, 2010Spent the last two evenings trying to install and configure SC VMM. Total failure. Kept getting an error about not being able to connect to the agent on the host – this is after the initial failure of trying to install SC VMM on the host.
Nothing worked for me – its odd as we’ve had it working at work.
Not worth anymore effort – I’ll stick with WMI and PowerShell.
PAM 0.3
Published November 14, 2010I’ve added another module to the PSAM project on codeplex.
Version 0.3 now has:
PAMShares – for working with shares
PAMMath – for working with binary and hex
PAMEnv – for working with environmental variables
The modules can be downloaded from http://psam.codeplex.com/
Enjoy
Remove environmental variable
Published November 14, 2010Lets round off looking at environmental variables by looking at how to remove them
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function remove-environment {
param ( [string][ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]$name, [switch]$perm, [switch]$machine ) $value = "" if (-not $perm) {Remove-Item -Path env:\$($name) -Force} else { if ($machine){$type = "Machine"} else {$type = "User"} [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable($name, $value, $type) } } |
If you want to remove it permanently use the –perm switch otherwise it is just removed from the session
Changing environmental variables
Published November 14, 2010This is similar to creating them.
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function set-environment {
param ( [string][ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]$name, [string][ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]$value, [switch]$perm, [switch]$machine ) if (-not $perm) {Set-Item -Path env:\$($name) -Value $($value)} else { if ($machine){$type = "Machine"} else {$type = "User"} [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable($name, $value, $type) } Get-Item -Path env:\$($name) } |
We use the same variables as when creating a variable. If a permanent change is required we use the –perm switch but remember that the change won’t be seen until PowerShell is restarted
PowerShell and WMI book
Published November 14, 2010A few months ago I started work on a follow up to PowerShell in Practice – http://www.manning.com/siddaway/ .
This book will also be published by Manning. It covers PowerShell and WMI. These two powerful technologies work well together to give a superb environment for managing your systems. WMI has had a bit of a bad reputation over the years but PowerShell really does make it easy to work with.
The first three chapters are available no through the Manning Early Access Program [MEAP] from http://www.manning.com/siddaway2/
Chapters 4 and 5 are in the pipeline and I’m currently working on chapter 6.
Please leave any comments on the author forum or here
Enjoy.
PowerShell in Practice goes mobile
Published November 12, 2010PowerShell in Practice is now available in mobi and epub formats for use on Kindle, iPhone, Sony Reader etc etc
If you have a copy of the book you should be getting emailed about the availability of these new formats. Otherwise check out http://www.manning.com/catalog/mobile/