Poshoholic

Just to follow-up on Monday’s post, the .NET Rocks! and RunAs recordings are now available.

.NET Rocks! episode #311 can be found here.

RunAs Radio episode #42 can be found here.

And in case you are just reading this now and didn’t see my other post, dnrTV episode #99 was posted on Sunday and can be found here.

If you have some time and want to learn more about PowerShell and PowerGUI, I encourage you to give these shows a listen.

Thanks again to Carl and Richard for inviting me to be on these shows and for setting up Kirk week on Pwop! :)  This has been a real treat.

As with anything I do, feedback is welcome and appreciated, positive or negative.

Kirk out.

P.S. If you like screencast or podcast recordings like this and would like to see more, let me know.  And don’t forget the PowerScripting Podcast, a bi-weekly podcast about all things PowerShell.

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During the past two weeks I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes of .NET Rocks!, RunAs Radio and dnrTV fame about PowerShell, PowerGUI and the Quest AD Cmdlets.  For those of you who don’t know, .NET Rocks! is an internet audio talk show about .NET and dnrTV is the equivalent in an internet screencast format.  Both of these are targeted at the .NET developer.  RunAs Radio is an internet audio talk show for IT professionals who work with Microsoft products.

I didn’t know what to expect from any of these interviews, but fortunately Carl, Richard and Greg are real pros at this and it was a real treat to chat with them.  I believe the end result is much better than what you get from the typical webcast or screencast because they ask the right questions and great conversation comes out as a result.

I was planning on blogging about this before any of these were posted, but these guys are really on top of things and to my surprise this morning I found out that Carl already posted the recording from dnrTV, so you can watch the episode #99 now.  It is simply called “Kirk Munro on PowerGUI”, and can be found here.  The .NET Rocks! and RunAs Radio sessions are not posted yet, but they should be later this week.  I’ll post an update once they are available.

Whether you’re interested in PowerGUI, PowerShell, .NET or working with Microsoft products in general, I encourage you to watch dnrTV and listen to RunAs Radio and .NET Rocks!  What a great way to spend your morning and evening commute in the subway, on the bus, or in your car (although please don’t watch dnrTV while driving your car…that’s just not a good idea; no matter how much you want to learn what PowerGUI and PowerShell can do for you, they won’t fix your car).

Thanks again to Carl and Richard for getting in touch with me and setting this up!  It’s been a great experience!

Lastly, if you’re interested in listening to a bi-weekly podcast that is specifically about PowerShell, you should also check out the PowerScripting Podcast.  The PowerScripting Podcast is hosted by Jonathan Walz and Hal Rottenberg and if you’re into all things PowerShell like I am, this gives you one more way to stay informed about PowerShell during the daily commute.

Thanks for listening!

Kirk out.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell, PoSh, Poshoholic, PowerGUI, Quest AD Cmdlets, dnrTV, .NET Rocks!, RunAs Radio
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Yesterday PowerGUI 1.0.13 was made available for download on the PowerGUI community site.  Aside from the many great new features in PowerGUI and the PowerGUI Script Editor (which you can read about here on Richard Siddaway’s blog), I wanted to share some of the details about the enhancements and additions that were made in the area that I am responsible for in this release — the PowerPacks.  Here is a list of the changes that were included:

Local System PowerPack:

• added description, startup type and logon account to the output properties on the services node
• replaced hard-coded event log tree with dynamic tree that shows all event logs on the system (note: this doesn’t support the custom views that can be created in the Vista event log viewer yet)
• added actions to clear all events in an event log, set the maximum size and set the overflow policy
• updated the Drives node so that drives are automatically grouped by provider type when there are multiple drives on a system
• fixed issues preventing the browsing of certain drives from working properly
• added support for viewing the security descriptor and the access control list for files, directories and registry keys
• added take ownership support for security descriptors
• added Values link to view the values associated with a registry key and Change Value action to change a registry value
• added support for an expanded view of environment variables that contain multiple values delimited by semi-colons
• added open file support
• added support for signing files from a certificate provider drive

Active Directory PowerPack:

• replaced Browse the Domain node with Browse Active Directory node; this supports browsing all of Active Directory within PowerGUI, not just the Domain Naming Context node
• added action to delete a computer object from AD
• added Member Of (Recursive) links for groups, and computers
• added Member Of link for users

WMI Browser PowerPack (new!):

• introduced brand new PowerPack for browsing WMI objects on the local computer or remote computers
• exposed support for managing specific computers via WMI; you just use the Add Connection and Remove Connection actions that are exposed through the root WMI Browser node
• exposed all WMI objects on a computer; you just browse through the WMI object tree to the one you are looking for and then use the Get WMI Objects link to view the WMI objects of that class type

There is still a lot more to do with the PowerPacks and this is only the beginning.  I’m completely focused on enhancing the PowerPacks that come with PowerGUI, so if you have suggestions, requests, or feedback to offer, I’d be more than happy to hear it — just leave me a comment on this blog.  Or if you are trying to make a PowerPack yourself and want home help or suggestions, you can comment about that here too or just post about it on the PowerGUI Forums.

And if you haven’t downloaded PowerGUI 1.0.13 yet, please give it a try and let me know what you think!

Kirk out.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell, PoSh, Poshoholic, PowerGUI, PowerPack
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Way back in February last year, Jeffrey Snover posted an article on the PowerShell blog describing how to support -Whatif, -Confirm and -Verbose in PowerShell functions and scripts.  As he states in that article, this is very important because it shows you how you can give consumers of your function or script the same safeguards that they get in PowerShell cmdlets.  If you haven’t read the article and you are sharing scripts that make system changes with others, you should take a few minutes to read it and strongly consider (read: this is really a good idea) using the Should-Process function it describes in those scripts. You can find that article here.

That said, there is one issue that I do have with the implementation of the Should-Process function as posted in that article — it is full of hard-coded English strings when it doesn’t need to be.  At the time of this writing PowerShell is already localized in 10 languages and is already being used heavily internationally, so it makes sense to provide localized PowerShell scripts whenever possible, right?  That might sound daunting, but since the strings used in the output generated by -Whatif, -Confirm and -Verbose are already stored in the PowerShell resource string tables, we should be able to extract them using PowerShell itself and then use the extracted, localized strings in our scripts.

So how do we go about doing this?  The answer is pretty simple: use Get-PSResourceString.

Get-PSResourceString is part of the CmdletExtensionLibrary.ps1 script that I published a little while ago.  It is used to retrieve localized resource strings from the PowerShell engine and host.  Using that function I was able to convert all of the strings that are used in Jeffrey’s version of the Should-Process function into calls to Get-PSResourceString so that they will be localized.  The end result is a localized¹ version of the Should-Process function that I have also included in the most recent version of the CmdletExtensionLibrary.ps1 script.

Both of these functions are quite long and not very blog-friendly, so I’ll leave it up to you to open the CmdletExtensionLibrary.ps1 script file in the editor of your choice and take a look at them.  This script originally started as a small project to dig into dynamic parameters, but I’ve found the functions I created in that work so useful myself that I’ve been adding more and more to it, a trend that will likely continue.  If you only want the Get-PSResourceString and Should-Process functions, you can simply copy them out of that script and use them however you like.  And of course, if you see any issues with the functions in this script, have any questions, or want to share suggestions on how to improve it even more, I’m more than happy to listen.

Kirk out.

¹ Note that while I’m trying to provide localized scripts as well as functions to facilitate writing localized scripts to support the international PowerShell community, all documentation for these functions is only in English and there are a few hard-coded strings only in English for variable and alias descriptions and one output message in English for the script file itself.  Aside from those few exceptions (that you’re not likely to see anyway), if you’re using a localized version of PowerShell the functions in the CmdletExtensionLibrary.ps1 file should properly support your localized version.

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I spend a fair amount of time answering questions in the Microsoft PowerShell discussion group (*cough* newsgroup).  The easiest way I have found to do this is over the past year is to use good ole’ Outlook Express (um…dated!).  It has the simplicity and the efficiency that allows me to stay on top of what’s going on with little effort.

Well recently Garth Jones suggested I use Windows Mail instead, but that comes with Vista and I don’t use Vista on the majority of machines I work on yet.  Fortunately Windows Live Mail is available, and it is both the successor to Windows Mail on Vista and Outlook Express on Windows XP so I decided to give it a try.  Well I’m quite happy I did.  It maintains the simplicity that I was used to in Outlook Express while adding many nice new features such as support for voting on posts, identifying the type of message when you post as a comment, question or suggestion, and some light integration with blogging by allowing you to publish a newsgroup message directly to your Windows Live Spaces blog (hopefully in the future this will extend to support integration with Windows Live Writer so that you can then publish to a blog on other blog hosting sites as well).  And it’s free.  All in all, it’s quite a nice improvement over Outlook Express and I recommend giving it a try, whether you need to post a message on a newsgroup or if you just want to read existing posts.

There is also one other nice little feature that Garth brought to my attention.  Posts from any Microsoft MVP are identified with a MVP logo if they were posted to the newsgroup using Windows (Live) Mail and if they are viewed using Windows (Live) Mail as well.  Here’s part of a screenshot showing how posts are identified as questions vs comments as well as showing off the nice little MVP logo that appears next to Microsoft MVPs.

It’s not a must have feature, but I certainly like it.

Kirk out.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell, PoSh, Poshoholic, Windows Live Mail
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If you haven’t noticed already, there is a growing community site dedicated to everything PowerShell.  One of the features offered on this site are blogs related to PowerShell.  The list of blogs on this site has been growing over the past few months and will likely continue to grow.  If you are like me and want to stay on top of all things PowerShell, there is a very simple way to subscribe to all blogs on this site, old and new.  Simply point your favorite news reader to the following RSS feed:

 PowerShell Community aggregated blog feed

This RSS feed will aggregate all posts from any blogs on the PowerShell Community site, so you won’t have to worry about managing your feeds for this site manually anymore.

Don’t forget about the plethora of wonderful PowerShell blogs outside of this community site though!

Enjoy!

Kirk out.

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Last night I hinted on my blog about the only Christmas present that I was hoping for possibly arriving in the next few days.  Well today it arrived, and color me a happy camper!

I just received the 2008 Microsoft MVP Award for my efforts in the PowerShell (Windows Server - Admin Frameworks) technical community during 2007!  What a great way to start off the New Year!

I am truly honored to receive this award.  It has been a dream of mine for many years to become a Microsoft MVP, and I was just waiting for the right time and the right product/technology to come along to go after it.  As I indicated on my first blog entry in August last year, PowerShell came along and totally blew me away.  The PowerShell product and the incredibly rich community surrounding it continue to amaze and excite me, and this is only the beginning.

Many thanks to Microsoft for the award, and to supporters of my PowerShell work in the community.  A special thanks needs to be sent out to David Sengupta and Dmitry Sotnikov for their support as well — without their support I don’t know if this would have happened.  And lastly, thanks to my wonderful wife for supporting my efforts and putting up with many very long hours over the past year while I made my way through quite a few changes, this one included.

My PowerShell MVP profile can be found here.  It’s pretty empty at the moment, but I’ll be updating it very soon.

Thanks again everyone! 

Kirk out.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell, PoSh, Poshoholic, Microsoft MVP, PowerShell MVP
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