Voting for the 2013 PowerShell Summit sessions is now open!

Learn the top 5 things VMware does in PowerShell that is different to anything you have seen before, see how a 3rd Party can take the awesome sauce of PowerShell and add their own flare. This session will show you some cool features of VMware’s PowerShell snapin (PowerCLI) and show how VMware became the largest PowerShell community outside of Microsoft. This session is relevant to anyone who uses PowerShell as it will show the key features VMware included in their snapin and the benefits these give to system administrators.

In this session I will show you the shortcuts and tricks picked up when creating a complex reporting structure with PowerShell, how a simple HTML output script grew to be a reporting structure which can adapt to give detailed, nicely formatted reports on any application or system that has a PowerShell interface, and even some that don’t!

PowerShell 3 includes a ton of improvements to the integrated scripting editor, PowerShell ISE. As great as PowerShell ISE is in this version, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Fortunately, Microsoft anticipated that they wouldn’t be able to do everything, so they extended their support for creating Add-on Tools for PowerShell ISE.

In this session, the worlds first self-proclaimed Poshoholic and PowerShell MVP Kirk Munro will provide a soup to nuts demonstration of PowerShell ISE Add-on Tools, showing how you can create everything from simple menu extensions to feature rich windows that respond to ISE events and that are docked right inside of the ISE.

Technologies covered in this session include the PowerShell ISE object model, C#, WPF, eventing, Visual Studio 2012, and of course several core PowerShell features.

It seems like everyone’s interested in v3’s new Workflow feature, so let’s do a quick walkthrough of building one from scratch. We’ll skip the usual "provisioning" example and go for something a bit more constrained, and perhaps real-world, where workflow’s unique features can really be put to solid use. This’ll also be an opportunity to discuss what workflow can and can’t do, and discuss some of the options and permutations of using it.

What do you do when Enable-PSRemoting isn’t enough? Dig deeper. We’ll run through all of the major configuration scenarios, including how to use (and not abuse) TrustedHosts, how to set up an HTTPS listener (and use it), how to do non-domain authentication, how to enable CredSSP and configure it to be less than a major security hole, and more. Pretty much every possible Remoting config, we’ll cover. With detailed, step-by-step instructions!

You know you want to turn on Remoting. Heck, Win2012 turns it on for you and can’t be managed without it! But your "Security Guys" are freaking out, which is odd, because they don’t seem to mind RDP. So we’ll run through every single aspect of Remoting security: Mutual authentication. Auditing. Authentication. Delegation. Impersonation. Double-hop. Triple-hop. CredSSP. Kerberos. SSL. Everything. You bring the security guys’ questions, we’ll get you the most accurate answers possible to take back with you.

It’s an age-old problem: You want to set up some of your users to perform some basic task, but you don’t actually want to give them permissions to do it, and you certainly don’t want to give them the MMC necessary to do it. Thanks to Remoting and a little WinForms action, that’s no problem. We’ll walk through how to set up a constrained Remoting endpoint that can run a highly limited set of predefined commands, and that runs them under alternate credentials. Then we’ll build a simple GUI app, suitable for end-user consumption, that utilizes the endpoint to accomplish the task. It’s the perfect way to build end-user tools, help desk utilities, and more!

We all want to make our lives easier… and often, that means giving users self-service tools to accomplish specific tasks. Deploying those tools can be a pain in the next, though, unless you can create them as a Web page. After all, a Web server provides a centralized platform. In this session, we’ll look at a couple of ways of building self-service Web pages. One, using /n software’s tool that lets a .PS1 become a Web page, and another in building a simple ASP.NET page that hosts PowerShell’s engine.

A comprehensive 400-level talk for module authors about authoring techniques for all types of Windows PowerShell Help, including About help and help for all command types, including cmdlets (and the MAML schema), scripts, functions, CIM commands, workflows (script and XAML), providers (including custom cmdlet help), and snippets. What you can and cannot do, and what’s worth doing when time and resources are short. We’ll cover online help, Updatable Help, and all the gotchas (HelpInfo XML, HelpInfoUri, HelpUri, CHMs), and I’ll share the scripts that I use to generate help files and verify the accuracy of parameters, parameter values, parameter attributes, GUIDs, and URIs.

See how PowerShell can be used as the glue of the datacenter, take information from VMware, Cisco and Microsoft, Glue them all together and go from bare metal up to the cloud and beyond. Learn how PowerShell is now expanding to be the language of choice and how Microsoft and third party products can be tied together to create fantastic solutions.

How can PowerShell be leveraged by the security professional doing Incident Response, Penetration Testing (Enumeration and Post-Exploitation) or performing an audit. The presentation will cover how PowerShell can be used to gather volatile information during an incident response, what cmdlets and technologies work best to gather the proper info and alter the least the system state. Use PowerShell to help in the documentation of the integrity of the results gathered. For the Pentester how to use PowerShell to write enumeration tools leveraging .Net and use PowerShell in post-exploitation running PowerShell in Shell,Leveraging Metasploit PowerShell mixing for running scripts to gain further foothold on target systems, escalate privileges and log all keystrokes on a target.

The PowerCLI snapin is used to manage and automate your VMware vSphere and vCD environments. One of the strengths of the PowerCLI snapin from day 1 is it’s ability to flawlessly integrate with the rich API ecosystem vSphere and vCD offer. A byproduct of this tight API integration is the ability to scale your automation scripts for bigger environments. This session will show how it’s done, how you can use it and how easy it is.

The VMware vSphere environment provides many performance metrics to see what is going on inside. You can use these metrics for problem solving, performance reports and capacity planning. This session will explain how to tackle the collection and handling of these performance metrics. It will also show all the possibilities you have to present your data in a meaningful way. There will be some math and statistics involved, but that’ should be no problem for PowerShell and the average administrator.

With VMware’s PowerCLI snapin it is easy to automate the complete lifecycle management of your VMs. This sessions will show how this is done. With the available cmdlets you can create, configure, administer and remove any VM. Needless to say that the session will discuss the best practices. But it will also show some lesser known tricks to get your VMs in exactly the state you want them to be. And you’ll learn how you can produce meaningful reports at every step of the way. In short, "The Automated Life of a VM".

Are you ever concerned about updating a script, having it break, and can’t remember what you changed. This is source control by an IT Pro for IT Pros. Come check out some best practices and lessons learned on how to incorporate source control as part of writing scripts. Learn how to have your code available via the web and easily accessed on multiple machines. We’ll take a look at using GIT to ensure your code is always up to date and you can always get back to where you were if you break something.

This session will provide a quick overview of different options to manage AD using PowerShell. It will quickly jump into some of the shortcomings of the MSFT provided Active Directory module and how to work around them, and even "fix" them using proxy functions and the new Default Parameter Set feature in V3.

An in-depth talk for script authors and IT professionals interested in learning how to disconnect from live remote sessions and reconnect to those sessions later from an arbitrary client machine. What you can and can’t do with disconnected remote sessions, how remote sessions can be automatically disconnected because of network problems, how to query remote machines for available sessions you can connect to, and how to use disconnect session options.

Paul Higinbotham, the developer who coded the feature, and June Blender, Windows PowerShell programming writer, describe the design and architecture of disconnected sessions and explain how session information is retained and disconnected sessions are reconnected. We will cover the details of several remote session disconnect scenarios using the new and modified cmdlets for this feature and demonstrate how to use them.

You can use PSRemoting to run PowerShell scripts inside the guest OS of your VM. But what to do when PSRemoting isn’t possible or available ? Think for example of VMs in a DMZ or on a pvlan. This session will show some alternatives. Run scripts as part of the guest OS deployment, run scripts through the VMware Tools interface or use an external trigger, via the VMware Tools, to influence PS jobs scheduled inside the guest OS.

The introduction of the CIM cmdlets and “cmdlets over objects” in PowerShell v3 provide new ways to work with WMI. In addition, they bring a new way to access remote systems ? CIM sessions. Analogous to PowerShell remoting sessions they provide a new flexibility when working with WMI and remote machines. This session will demonstrate:
– How to use CIM sessions against systems running PowerShell v3
– How to work with legacy installations of PowerShell v2
– How to use the available CIM session options to configure the session to meet your requirements
– Compare and contrast working with WMI, CIM and WSMAN cmdlets against remote machines to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each
– How to mix and match CIM sessions using WSMAN and DCOM.

The key takeaways from this session will be:
– The CIM cmdlets provide a new way to access WMI
– WSMAN is required knowledge
– WSMAN and DCOM can both be used with the CIM cmdlets
– CIM sessions are easy to use and very powerful
– No more DCOM problems

There is a belief that using PowerShell means rejecting the use of legacy environments like vbScript and Console applications. Some may also believe that just because they have an older system it is not possible to manage it with PowerShell Watch as the most Energized MVP, Sean Kearney takes you into a world of wonder where the old and the new Co-Exist. See possibilities you may not have considered before.

Key take-aways:
– Interaction between modern day PowerShell and older apps
– Repurposing older tools as PowerShell cmdlets

The fight continues on. the argument between the great Lords above that PowerShell is a scripting Environment vs whether it is a Management console! Watch an Actual ITPro on Stage as he shows how he REALLY uses PowerShell in a day to day environment, from basic management and reporting needs, to building out a script to manage needed tasks Take aways Understanding that learning PowerShell does NOT mean a heavy reschooling.

Go hardcore. Or in this case FULL SERVER CORE 2012! Learn how you can fully manage a complete clustered Hyper-V core environment in Server 2012 from Creation of the Cluster to management of the Virtual machines including Site replication all without the GUI.

Take aways? Be hard core and go CORE! 🙂

Ok this isn’t Deep Dive and I don’t expect anybody to PAY for this but I’m willing to talk about just HOW and WHY I turned into a musical Madman 🙂

I’ve been using PowerShell for over 6 years. Blogging about it for over 5 years. Creating and managing products based on PowerShell for about that long as well, and writing a whole lot of scripts during the process. During this time I’ve come up with a trick or three to make that work easier. Some of these tricks are simple time savers, while others are ground breaking opportunities that just might change the way you write PowerShell.

Come and join me in this session to get a bird’s eye view at some of the work I’ve been doing with PowerShell, as I talk about tips, tricks, and best practices while demonstrating some of the extensions I’ve written specifically to make authoring with PowerShell easier to do.

Topics discussed include proxy functions, WMI/CIM, Microsoft Office, DSVs, WiX, merge modules, type accelerators, and more.

SMAPI is what exposes the Storage module for Windows PowerShell. This session would be focused on providing some details on what it is, how it works, in which cases 3rd party drivers are required, and how it’s surfaced as a PowerShell module. More information: This session is recommended as a background for the "Managing Storage with PowerShell" and "Managing Storage Spaces with PowerShell" sessions.

A dive into using the Storage module for Windows PowerShell to manage local storage, Storage Spaces, and array-based storage using PowerShell. More information: The focus of this session will be on the management of Disk, Partition, and Volume objects, with a brief overview of how this applies to Storage Spaces.

This topic will focus specifically on deploying, configuring, and managing Storage Spaces using PowerShell. More information: Will cover deployment of Storage Spaces from beginning to end using PowerShell, and focus on using PowerShell to manage Storage Spaces. The "Introduction to the Storage Management API" session is strongly recommended before attending this session.

This topic introduces users to the iSCSI and MPIO modules in Windows PowerShell on Server 2012, and discusses how to configure these features using PowerShell.

Ever wanted to make PowerShell easy for others? Or realize that a simple script you have would be a great backbone of a business (if only you could charge for it)? PowerShell Pipeworks is a web platform built in PowerShell that makes is simple to build compelling web applications and software services in a snap. In this session, you will see: – How to use Pipeworks to store your data to the cloud – How to create a monitoring dashboard with Pipeworks – How to build a Facebook application with PowerShell Pipeworks – How to put a price tag on a cmdlet

Windows 8/2012 introduces a large number of cmdlets for working with networks and network configurations. This session will introduce those cmdlets and see how you can get the best out of them in your environment. There are a number of interesting quirks associated with these cmdlets that you need to be aware of and they will be demonstrated in the session. Like so much of the functionality in Windows 8/2012 these cmdlets are based on WMI using the CDXML functionality. This will be briefly explained with a look inside one of the networking modules. These cmdlets are only available on Windows 8/2012 but with a bit of WMI you can duplicate the functionality in your environment.

PowerShell Web Access is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 that provides a web based PowerShell console. You don’t need PowerShell on your client to administer remote machines as long as you have PWA. This session will demonstrate how to configure PWA, its strengths and weaknesses – you might even see PowerShell being accessed from a non-Windows machine! The security implications of PWA will be discussed. PWA will be compared to other ways to access remote machines through PowerShell including PS Remoting and CIM sessions.

In this session I’ll show you just how easy it is to write a simple deployment script for a Hyper-V cluster… in only 30 minutes!

Ever wondered how you could annoy your users, managers and even your colleagues with PowerShell? Come to this session and let me show you how you can become a BOFH with PowerShell!

The pipeline… although it is a wonderful concept and very powerful it is also slow. Lots of people pipe everything together and although it may work, you may have some time to get some more coffee before your script is done running. Let me show you how you can avoid the pipeline by utilizing the full potential of cmdlets and their parameters… and with logical thinking.

The readers of my blog know that I simply love one-liners in PowerShell… Over the years I’ve learned lots of tricks which allow you to put just about anything in a single line of code. Although it’s not pretty, it’s fun to do and wouldn’t it be cool to make a developer cry just by looking at such a one-liner?

This will not be a technical session… Back when PowerShell v1 was introduced the first thing I though was: "I can do a heck of a lot more with VBS!". Then PowerShell v2 came along and I was sold! A lot of people would have bought books to learn it… I did not. Instead I started to play around in the prompt. Only after two years I bought my first PowerShell book. In this session I will share with you both the rise and fall of my learning experience of learning PowerShell from the prompt.

You:"Let’s enable PowerShell Remoting!". Manager:"Why?" You:"So I can manage the entire environment through PowerShell from a single management server?". Manager:"No!" Does this discussion sound familiar? If that’s the case, let me share with you the things I’ve learned which make it easy for you to ‘sell’ PowerShell to managers from a practical point of view.

With Windows Server 2012 there comes a new feature named Data Deduplication. How can you configure and manage this through PowerShell? But more importantly, how can you do more with it than the native PowerShell module offers you? This and more will be shown in a very fast-paced session… so faster your seat belts Dorothy ’cause Kansas is going bye-bye!

This talk will provide a walk through of Unit Testing PowerShell scripts. The OSS project Pester (https://github.com/pester/Pester) will be used to illustrate popular unit testing patterns such as ArrangeActAssert and Mocking to provide testability to PowerShell. There will be discussion on why and when to use unit testing in PowerShell as well.

Sick of losing a day’s productivity to setting up a new Machine? Do you find it tedious keeping track of your favorite tools, software settings and windows settings? Do you find using VMs for this task to be awkward and fragile? Learn how to use Chocolatey (http://chocolatey.org) and other PowerShell tricks to bring this entire process into a single script that will run on its own in just about an hour (give or take depending on installs). You can even have several bootstrapping configurations depending on your scenarios. One for work, another light weight one for Remoting on to a new serer and another for personal machines.

In this session we will take apart PowerShell. This session will highlight the new abstract syntax tree and node visitor API that is exposed in v3. An instrumentation profiler will be used as an example of how to traverse and manipulate PowerShell scripts from within the engine.

In this session we will look at how to utilize ILSpy to decompile .NET assemblies and quickly access internal aspects of them using PowerShell. We will see how to easily expose private members for access and manipulation within scripts. Adam Driscoll

Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM) is a complex product that benefits greatly in a DevOps world facilitated by PowerShell. Come learn how PowerShell improves FIM deployments, highlighting the PowerShell lessons learned from a non-PowerShell MVP, and arguably a non-developer. Topics will include: FIM Test Automation with PowerShell FIM Deployment Automation with PowerShell FIM Extensibility with PowerShell FIM Workflow with PowerShell FIM Diagnostics with PowerShell Craig Martin is a FIM MVP with a passion for improving integration and automation quality with PowerShell.

PowerShell turns out to be an excellent tool for collecting data about just anything. This session shows you how to get objects from PowerShell into SSRS reports quickly and simply, and all without using a data warehouse. This session will explain and demonstrate the use of a CodePlex project (psdpe.codeplex.com) to marry PowerShell and SSRS to provide some of the following benefits:

SSRS Report Designers – Produce Reports in a Simple Design Experience using Objects from a PowerShell Pipeline SSRS Data

Driven Subscriptions – Automatically distribute custom reports to users with data that pertains only to them

SSRS Caching – Cache reports in SSRS for later viewing so that your script does not need to reproduce the data

SSRS Data Processing Extensions – use SSRS to report on PowerShell objects (the core of the topic)

The API Economy is all the rage, at least when we’re not hearing about how cool PowerShell is. The idea is a replacement for ODBC, LDAP, or any other API, and preference by application developers to use OData and RESTful web services. Should we all get busy writing APIs then? Turns out PowerShell users already have, by writing scripts and modules. This new feature in PowerShell exposes the investment in commands to developers that may not care about about PowerShell, but instead demand to consume an API based on OData. Got a command for getting User objects? well now you can share that as an URL such as http://myServer/User (gets all the user objects) or http://myServer/User(‘Craig’)/Manager (gets Craig’s manager). The magic here is that the developer is reaping all the rewards of your hard PowerShell work, but that developer never needs to know that the URLs are actually powered by, well PowerShell. This talk will share the experience of an IT Pro with scripting experience, learning how to create APIs using the new Management OData IIS Extension.

We all know there is a wealth of information that you can uncover with PowerShell. Sometimes, getting this into a format that someone can read can be a challenge. In this session I’ll explain a number of techniques you can use for creating dazzling reports from PowerShell. From simple text files, to snazzy HTML reports to full-on Microsoft Word documents.

After PowerShell, Microsoft Excel is probably an IT Pro’s most often used management tool. We store data in spreadsheets. We use spreadsheets as sources for our scripts and functions. Or maybe you would like to do these things but don’t know where to start. In this session I’ll explain how to integrate Excel into your PowerShell experience. From pulling data from simple spreadsheets to creating stunning reports complete with tables, charts and graphs.

IT Pro’s have been able to manage Active Directory with PowerShell for while. But that was only the beginning. Windows Server 2012 offers a tantalizing array of Active Directory management options. In this session I will offer a number of tips and tricks that take advantage of these new features.

PowerShell is a natural tool for file system management. IT Pros copy, delete and move files all the time. Even though storage is cheap and plentiful these days, wouldn’t it be nice to add some compression techniques to your PowerShell scripts and functions? This session will demonstrate a number of ways you can add compression to your file management tasks. From simple file and folder compression to creating complete archives. We’ll look at using the shell, 3rd party tools and WMI.

Without question the ISE in PowerShell v3 is a vast and welcome improvement over v2. One of the best features, which hasn’t gotten much attention, is the use of snippets. These little code gems can make writing a new script or function a breeze and even fun. But you can also add your own snippets. In this session I’ll explain how the snippet system works, demonstrate how you can add your own snippets and manage your snippet library, all from the ISE.

Graphical PowerShell scripts seem all the rage these days. But most often that means using Windows Forms which can be very tedious to work with. But that is not the only game in town. Depending on your requirements there are a number of techniques you can use to add graphical elements to your PowerShell scripts. This session will explore how to create message boxes, input forms and more, all without a single Windows Form. If you are just getting started with writing PowerShell scripts, you’ll find these techniques simple to use, plus there will be plenty of sample code for all!

It is a safe bet to say that most IT Pros have a backup solution in place for their organization. But sometimes you need something a bit more flexible or for special situations. Perhaps you have a lab or home test environment that needs protection. In this session, I will walk you through how to use PowerShell to set up a quick and dirty backup solution. This isn’t necessarily a replacement for a full-fledged backup product, but it just might help fill the gaps.

If you manage file servers and aren’t using PowerShell, you are working much too hard. Or if you are using PowerShell v2 you are still working pretty hard. Fortunately PowerShell v3 along with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 offer a much better solution. This session will demonstrate how to provision and manage folders, files and file shares using PowerShell from a Windows 8 client. With a little up-front work, you ‘ll be able to create provisioning scripts to deploy a new file share in seconds.

Most of the time, managing a distributed file system (DFS) infrastructure is pretty simple and graphical tools are fine. But all the cool kids will use PowerShell. Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 offer a better way for managing DFS. From creating new folders to getting a handle on what it looks like now, to troubleshooting access problems, this session will demonstrate how to have it all from a PowerShell prompt.

Learn how to get the most from Windows PowerShell by learning a simple five-step method to transform your Windows PowerShell code into a highly reusable module. This presentation is a live demo that begins with a single line of Windows PowerShell code, transforms the code into a function, adds comment based help to the function, and converts it into a module. Next, the installation and discovery of Windows PowerShell modules is covered, as is updating the module and creating a Windows PowerShell module manifest. Ed Wilson

The 2012 Scripting Games attracted both experienced and novice scripters from more than 100 countries around the world. In grading the 2000 submitted scripts, I noticed a common theme emerged. Some of the things that were consistently confused by both beginners and advanced scripters include the following: failure to return objects from functions, not creating reusable functions, spending too much duplicating capabilities of native PowerShell, using meaningless comments, omission of error handling, and an overreliance on Write-Host. In this session, I will address each of these areas of concern and show both good and bad examples from the games. A thorough discussion of each of these topics rounds out the presentation. This presentation uses live demos to illustrate the techniques that are discussed. Ed Wilson

There are three different ways to manage a remote Windows 8 workstation. The first is to use WMI remoting, the second is to use the computername cmdlets and the third is to use WinRm and Windows PowerShell native remoting. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages for the network administrator. In this session, I will examine each approach, and provide a checklist of criteria to aid the enterprise network administrator in choosing the appropriate technology for a variety of real world scenarios. This presentation combines live demos and interactive discussion to heighten learning.

Using the reliability provider on Windows 8 workstation or on a Windows Server 2012 machine provides a plethora of information about the health of your system. Unfortunately, the reliability provider is not enabled by default on Windows Server 2012, and attempts to enable it do not always work. In this session, I discuss the issues surrounding the reliability provider, illustrate the type of information available, and hint at how to incorporate its use into a normal monitoring program. Live demos using easily created Windows PowerShell scripts round out the discussion.

One of the cool features on Windows PowerShell 3.0 is easy consumption of WMI performance counters into Windows PowerShell. In the past, leveraging these performance counters meant writing long lines of cryptic code, calling refresher objects, and dealing with weird timestamp issues. But no more! Using a simple cmdlet, Windows PowerShell throws open the door to the treasure trove of performance counter information. But where does the oversubscribed IT pro begin? A question on my Windows NT 3.51 MCSE exam stated there are four areas for performance monitoring: disk, memory, network, and CPU. These four resources have not changed much, regardless of the application these basic areas of investigation still ring true. In this session, I talk about discovering performance counters, using performance counters, and storing information gathered from performance counters. The talk will be strengthened by live demos at each stage of the presentation.

”IT Pros don’t script.” I have heard this mantra for more than a decade – ever since I wrote my best selling Windows Scripting Self-Paced Learning Guide for Microsoft Press. But Windows PowerShell is more than just a new scripting language – in fact, some PowerShell MVPs have stated that Windows PowerShell is not a scripting language at all. Also, and more to the point, Windows PowerShell is not even all that new, with Windows 8, Windows PowerShell enters the 3rd version – it is therefore established technology. Simply put, Windows PowerShell is the future automation story in the Microsoft world, but it is also the present, and the IT Pro who learns how to use this tool will immediately become a more productive, and consequently more valuable employee. In this session I will discuss the extent to which Windows PowerShell permeates the Microsoft eco system, and offer real world scenarios that illustrate both the power, and the simplicity of this management tool.

Windows 2012 brings 2500 cmdlets – over 60% of them are CDXML. That’s a WMI class wrapped in XML and published as a module. In this session you will discover how this technology works and more importantly how to easily create your own cmdlets to simplify the use of WMI

PowerShell for Active Directory gets a major boost in Windows 2012. The AD administrative center now exposes the PowerShell it uses and we get cmdlets for working the topology. In this session you’ll learn about AD admin center and how to get the best out if the new AD cmdlets with a look at some tips and tricks for working with AD in general. You’ll also discover that the AD provider does a lot more than you think it can.

WMI is dead! Long live CIM! PowerShell v3 introduces the CIM cmdlets. Are they a replacement for the WMI cmdlets? Are they easier to use? In this session we’ll take them apart and see what makes them tick. A compare and contrast with the WMI cmdlets will show you when to use one or the other and how to get the best out of both.

You’ve used the back ground jobs functionality in PowerShell v2. In PowerShell v3 you get the chance to work with the task scheduler. A set of cmdlets straight out of the PowerShell box for working with scheduled tasks. Automation rises to a new level when you can tell the job to run in the middle of the night and you don’t need to be there. Learn how to do this and more in this session

Managers always want reports. Can’t be avoided but the task can be made easier. In this session we’ll look at creating some reports based on real world examples: 1. Get the size of your Exchange databases and free disk space. Store the results in SQL Server. Create reports that show current situation and trends over time. 2. All administrators hate documenting their servers. Learn how to create a report that writes itself – literally. Keep your server documentation up to date with no effort on your part.

The PowerShell event engine enables you to work with .NET; WMI and PowerShell engine events. What are these and how do they work? What can I do with them? Want to stop a process that shouldn’t be running? Want to start a process that’s stopped? That’s what this session will show you with PowerShell events.

PowerShell remoting uses the WS-Management protocols as transport between the local and remote machines. This is implemented as the WinRm service. We can utilise the WS-Management layer (WSMAN) directly to access WMI providers. This session opens up one of the least used areas of PowerShell v2. We will see how to use the WSMAN cmdlets:
– Connect-WSMan
– Disconnect-WSMan
– Get-WSManInstance
– Invoke-WSManAction
– New-WSManInstance
– New-WSManSessionOption
– Remove-WSManInstance
– Set-WSManInstance
– Test-WSMan

With these we can access a remote machine in a similar manner to using the WMI cmdlets or PowerShell remoting. The advantage over WMI cmdlets is that we don’t need DCOM. These cmdlets aren’t straight forward to use but there is an untapped administration opportunity that potentially also enables us to administer remote machines that aren’t Windows based. The session will be heavy on code and short on slides as this is a subject best demonstrated.

PowerShell normally runs tasks in the fore ground. This ties up the PowerShell prompt and stops you doing other work. We could just open lots of PowerShell prompts but a better way is to use PowerShell jobs. PowerShell jobs run in the background. You can have multiple jobs running simultaneously and still work at the prompt. Better still the jobs? results are saved until you are ready to use them. PowerShell jobs are an under used item in the administrators tool box. This session will show what they can do and how we can make the most of them. Lots of code and minimal slides make the session very interactive.

Storing data in SQL server is not a new idea. Accessing SQL Server using PowerShell opens up this data store for us. This session will show how to use SQL Server to store your data; how you can read, update and if necessary delete the data. Simple PowerShell routines that open a lot of power.

Hear Microsoft PFE Ashley McGlone explain how he got out of this one. Global 24×7 mission-critical customer had a single text file DNS primary zone hosting all 10 Active Directory domain zones in the forest. Needed to switch to AD-integrated DNS, split out all zones into separate domains, and delegate DNS administration. Then they explained there are no change control maintenance windows, and it had to be done with zero down time. He did it. Come find out how PowerShell saved this customer.

I got a panic call from the customer. Half way through the AD domain migration their third party migration tool database crashed and was unrecoverable. They lost all SID history conversion tracking. The vendor doing the migration was unsure how to proceed. Hear Microsoft PFE Ashley McGlone explain how PowerShell saved the customer. Do you know where your SID history is hiding?

I had a customer who acquires 13 new companies each year. They have more than 35 domains in the forest and another 80 trusts. With over 170,000 instances of SID history in the forest they had no idea where to begin fixing SID history on file shares. They needed a way to migrate ACLs on their file servers, to report on the impact, and to manage it effectively in the future. Where would you begin? Hear Microsoft PFE Ashley McGlone explain how PowerShell saved the customer.

Aren’t manual setup checklists the greatest? How about virtual machine images that have been cloned for so long nobody knows where they come from? Nobody likes spending hours doing the same things over and over again, or reverse engineering what configuration changes someone made to a server before walking out the door. Come learn about Carbon (http://get-carbon.org), the DevOps module I created that enables us to spin up dozens of servers in just a few hours. I’ll give an overview of all the functionality available in Carbon, then dive deep into some of the things I’ve learned and discovered during development.

When we implemented Jenzabar CX as our college’s ERP solution, it became our authoritative data source and the driver for things like Active Directory account creation and maintenance. Initially, we used a series of VBScripts to handle the integration with AD. When I was tasked with fixing and maintaining that code, two things because clear. First, The existing code was virtually unmaintainable. Second, PowerShell made it relatively easy to create a solution that was modular, flexible and easily maintained. I’ll look at how we implemented the communication from CX to AD and from AD to CX using /nSoftware’s PowerShell Server and ODBC. I’ll also look at the way we decomposed the creation and maintenance various types of AD accounts into discrete tasks and used that to create a modular library of functions that allows us to use a building block approach to not only implementing the automated processes that we needed, but also create an interactive set of tools for our Service Desk people to view and modify AD accounts in a controlled way.

Need to deploy and manage certificates for your websites? When was the last time you checked to see if your website certificates were about to expire? In this session with renowned PowerShell and IIS expert Jason Helmick, you will deploy, manage, revoke and remove certificates to multiple remote IIS servers running Windows Server Core. Discover and alert when certificates are about to expire and handle creating and changing SSLBindings in IIS.

Increase productivity while increasing time off using PowerShell! In this session with renowned PowerShell and IIS expert Jason Helmick, you will learn to provision a web farm of servers, sites and applications. Quickly adapt your web farm to the needs of the business with rapid scale load balancing. You will leave with the slides, demonstration steps and Jason’s tips to rapidly provision IIS. Don’t lose another weekend to web farm deployment and management!

Are you “on-call” and worried to leave the office? Not anymore! In this session with renowned PowerShell and IIS expert Jason Helmick, you will learn to implement and securely configure Windows Server 8 PowerShell Web Access. Take control with any device and cmdlets at your fingertips without the overhead of installing additional administration tools. You will leave with the slides, demonstration steps and Jason’s tips to securely deploy and utilize PowerShell Web Access.

ConfigMgr and PowerShell – we have finally arrived! ConfigMgr and WMI have been a match made in heaven for the since at least SMS 2.0, so we’ve always been able to use PowerShell with ConfigMgr. But finally, we have real cmdlets that will allow you to fully automate the administrative experience with ConfigMgr. Are you ready to take your Configuration Manager Admin experience to the next level? Greg shows you how to leverage PowerShell with Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1. Manage Deployments, Collections, Applications, Packages, Programs, and even Software Updates!

Creating script blocks for remote jobs and filters using local variables. Using script blocks to: create collections simplify code maintenance get user input pipeline output from foreach loops

PowerShell can be a fun and crazy language to use, but we can take it a step further with metaprogramming. By taking advantage of PowerShell’s flexible language features including dynamic scoping, modules, deferred evaluation, and ScriptBlocks, we can create simple and powerful applications applications leveraging metaprogramming idioms.

Have you ever tried to figure out which dependencies your application has? Tired of messing with NuGet repository.config and packages.config files? Are you fed up with having to load Visual Studio and enabling package restore by hand? Ruby has had a solution for a long time with gems and bundler. By leveraging the features of PowerShell, .NET developers can have their own DSL for managing dependencies efficiently with Chewie.

To write a DSL or to not write a DSL, that is an important question. PowerShell gives us great power to create DSLs, but it doesn’t mean that we should create one. This talk will cover when to create a DSL along with techniques specific to PowerShell for creating them (deferred evaluation, first class objects, dynamic scoping, semantic models, dependency graphs, etc). Some existing PowerShell DSLs will be analyzed including as psake, pester, and chewie.

PowerShell is missing a few language features, but that doesn’t mean we can pretend. By changing our perspective slightly, we can apply parasitic and prototypal inheritance, open classes, monkey patching, and more. PowerShell was designed for solving problems for system administrators, but it isn’t limited to that domain.

Automated builds are a critical part of application lifecycle management. PowerShell is very well suited for making this process easier. We have gone full circle with scripting builds and by leveraging PowerShell on the command line and building DSLs, our builds can be more robust and intuitive than ever.

It is normal for us to have to face poorly performing queries or even complete failure in our SQL server environments. This can happen for a variety of reasons including poor Database Designs, hardware failure, improperly-configured systems and OS Updates applied without testing. As Database Administrators, we need to take precaution to minimize the impact of these problems when they occur, and so we need the tools and methodology required to identify and solve issues quickly. In this Session we will use PowerShell to explore some common troubleshooting techniques used in our day-to-day work as DBA. This will include a variety of such activities including gathering Blocked SQL Server Process, Reading & filtering the SQL Error Log even if the Instance is offline, Listing SQL Server and Database information and Register Temporary and Specific Events in the SQL Server WMI. The approach will be using PowerShell techniques that allow us to scale the code for multiple servers and run the data collection in asynchronous mode.

PowerShell has 2500 cmdlets available in Windows 2012 This session will give you a quick overview of what’s available and more importantly what you can do with it. There is so much functionality available that if you don’t know its there you can miss it. A quick overview of what’s available and lots of demos

With all the new WMI based functionality in PowerShell v3 its easy to forget the old WMI cmdlets. They are still there, still have their place and can teach us a few things about administering our systems. Some of the new PowerShell v3 functionality makes them easier to use – learn how Some of the WMI gotchas still remain – see what they are, how you overcome them and what effect they have on the new CIM cmdlets

In this session we will look at how to author enterprise-level modules using a combination of both PowerShell and C#. We’ll examine the common pitfalls and considerations that should be made when thinking about enterprise PowerShell support. We will look at how to build modules that are easy to test and maintain.

In this session you will learn how to manage your Event Logs with PowerShell cmdlets, leverage the power of Event Forwarding to centralize events to a central server and trigger execution of PowerShell scripts from a specific Windows event.

Server Manager in Windows Server 2012 has evolved to include many new multi-server management features. It uses Windows PowerShell behind the scenes, but can we use Windows PowerShell to automate customization of Server Manager? Yes, we can. Join us for this session to learn how.

In this session you will learn how to customize PowerShell session configuration, 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 new Windows PowerShell and Windows Remote Management 3.0 capabilities we will enable dynamic creation of customized automation environments that users can access through the Windows PowerShell Web Access.

In this session you will learn how to set up your environment to run Windows PowerShell workflows. We will discuss different workflow configurations, how to prepare computers to run workflows, what is workflow session configuration and how to customize it. At the end, you will learn how to properly run your Windows PowerShell workflows.

With Windows PowerShell 3.0 and the new Client Hyper-V available in Windows 8, it is so easy, and fun, to automate creation of your demo environment or a test lab infrastructure. You can easily convert ISO files to VHDs, deploy your VMs and configure networking and storage. Join us for this demo-heavy session to see all the steps.

In this, some might say blasphemous, session you will learn that uninstallation of Windows PowerShell doesn’t leave your Windows Server 2012 Server Core remotely unmanageable from the command line. We can still use Windows PowerShell on a client computer to access system CIM modules on a Server Core. Even better, we can increase its manageability by deploying our own CIM modules. Join us to see the power of CIM sessions and CIM modules.

The virtual datacenter is growing at a high rate. The increasing size and complexities can make scripting and reporting take too long to complete in a reasonable time period. Attendees will learn a variety of techniques and strategies you can use to speed up your scripting and reporting with PowerCLI and UCSPowerTool from two members of Cisco internal IT.

In this session I highlight many of the built in functionalities of PowerCLI that are extremely powerful but often underutilized. These cmdlets will increase your flexibility with PowerCLI and help increase efficiency.

Attendees will get a crash course in the unique and powerful cmdlets of the UCSPowerTool, PowerShell for the Cisco Unified Compute System.