PowerShell and WMI MEAP update

Chapters 8 and 9 of PowerShell and WMI have been released into the MEAP. They are available from http://www.manning.com/siddaway2/

Chapter 8 covers the File system

• Administer shares
• Compress or encrypt files
• Monitor file system events

Chapter 9 covers Services and processes including:

• service load order
• discover process owners
• use WMI events to control processes

The code from the chapters is available for download.

Next up is chapter 10 dealing with printers.

Chapter 11 on Networking is complete and I’m working on the IIS WMI provider (chapter 12) and configuring a new server (chapter 13)

Enjoy

Tuesday’s recording

The recording from Tuesdays UG meeting is available.

Richard Siddaway has invited you to view a Microsoft Office Live Meeting recording.
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Recording Details
Subject: PowerShell and COM objects
Recording URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/view
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Attendee Key: 4~_TzB%6w

The slides and scripts are available from

http://cid-43cfa46a74cf3e96.office.live.com/browse.aspx/PowerShell%20User%20Group/2011%20April

Previous meeting’s recordings are still available:

• Regular Expressions
• PowerShell utility cmdlets
• PowerShell best practice
• Remoting
• Registry
• DNS
• Events
• Modules

User Group meeting–tomorrow

Don’t forget the user group meeting tomorrow

http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2011/04/03/powershell-ug-meeting-april-2011-com-objects.aspx

Scripting Games 2011 commentary ||: top 10 mistakes

See this excellent for tips on what not to do when writing PowerShell scripts

http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/04/09/top-ten-mistakes-made-during-week-1-of-the-2011-scripting-games.aspx

Scripting Games 2011 commentary I: Line continuations

No I’m not going to give you the answers – you’ll just have to wait until the events close.

During (and possibly after) the games I’m going to comment on some of the things I’ve noticed about PowerShell usage.

I want to start with breaking a PowerShell line across multiple lines.  The “one liner” is what many PowerShell users aspire to and we can put together some impressive functionality by stringing together some cmdlets using the pipeline – for instance:

Get-Process | sort CPU -Descending | select -First 6 | Format-Table –AutoSize

Now we’ll assume we need to break this so that it fits on shorter lines.  The back tick is the line continuation character so we could end up with this

Get-Process | `
sort CPU -Descending | `
select -First 6 | `
Format-Table –AutoSize

which is actually easier to read.  Another alternative could be this

Get-Process `
| sort CPU -Descending `
| select -First 6 `
| Format-Table –AutoSize

which again is easy to read.  The difference is in the positioning of the back tick before or after the pipe symbol.

Both of these options take more effort than required.  All we need to do is this

Get-Process |
sort CPU -Descending |
select -First 6 |
Format-Table –AutoSize

The pipeline symbol works as a line continuation symbol as well.  Save typing and make life easier.

Enjoy!

Scripting Games have started

The 2011 Scripting Games have started and this year its a PowerShell only contest.  Head over to http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/ to get the details of the first events

PowerShell UG meeting–April 2011–COM objects

When: Tuesday, Apr 12, 2011 7:30 PM (BST)

Where: Live Meeting
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

COM and see what we can do with COM objects in PowerShell and why COM is on the need know technology list as far as administrators are concerned.

Notes

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PowerShell and VMware book

My good friends Jonathan Medd and Alan Renouf (together with a number of co-authors) have just had their book “VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration” published. More details on the book contents and for a chance to win a copy visit

http://www.jonathanmedd.net/2011/03/powercli-book-raffle.html

I’ll doing a full review of the book when I can get my hands on a copy

MVP award 2011

I received the email this afternoon to tell me my PowerShell MVP award has been renewed for another year. Its a great honour to receive an MVP award and I’d like to thank Microsoft for the award and the PowerShell community for the opportunities that have lead to the award.

PowerShell Deep Dive Agenda

The agenda for the PowerShell Deep Dive is available here http://www.theexpertsconference.com/us/2011/powershell-deep-dive/agenda/

There are still a few seats left at the discount price – but you need to hurry.  See

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2011/03/30/only-2-days-left-to-save-1000-on-powershell-deep-dive-registration.aspx