Tag: PowerGUI

Use PowerGUI to manage SQL Server 2008

Kirk MunroLeave a comment

SQL Server 2008 marks the first release for SQL Server that includes PowerShell support.  This is just the beginning of a trend for all Microsoft Server products now that PowerShell is part of their Common Engineering Criteria beginning in fiscal year 2009.  I just spent the past week or so experimenting with PowerShell and SQL Server, first using SMO directly and then using the snapins that are part of SQL Server 2008.

I’m still testing the waters in many places but so far I’m pretty happy with the PowerShell support in SQL Server 2008.  Back when they first announced support, it didn’t sound all that impressive but now that I’ve dug in and started using it myself I’ve found that it is much more than I thought it would be.  SQL Server 2008 is still in CTP, so there are still bugs and still changes coming, but overall this looks like a nice addition to PowerShell, and one that should get even better through service packs as time goes on.

While working with the SQL provider and cmdlets I put together my first-attempt at a SQL Server PowerPack for PowerGUI.  This PowerPack is pretty lightweight at this point, allowing you to browse through the SQL Server instances you have, add connections to other servers, open tables and views and view their contents, as well as a few other miscellaneous things.  It requires the SQL Server 2008 client tools, however it seems to work fine with SQL Server 2005 (and presumably SQL Server 2000 since it uses SMO and WMI under the covers) once you have the SQL Server 2008 client tools installed.  You can download the PowerPack here.

Over the next little while I will be continuing to enhance this PowerPack, so if you work with SQL Server and PowerShell and have any feedback or enhancement requests for this PowerPack, please let me know through comments, email (see my about page), or the PowerGUI forums.

Thanks,

Kirk out.

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Public beta of Quest AD cmdlets v1.1 now available

Kirk MunroLeave a comment

Quest Software (my employer, for the record) has just released the first public beta build of version 1.1 of the ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory (aka Quest AD cmdlets).  If you haven’t looked at these cmdlets yet, they fulfill the scripting needs of AD administrators using PowerShell today by providing them with cmdlets to facilitate management of Active Directory.

You’ll quickly notice once you download the beta that the Quest AD cmdlet team has been hard at work too, with 40 cmdlets available in this beta, now including support for security and permission management!  More fun commands to play with!

If you want to download the latest beta, you can find it here.  And feedback is welcome and appreciated on the PowerGUI community site in the AD forums.

Kirk out.

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How to create a PowerPack

Kirk MunroLeave a comment

A little while back Marco Shaw invited me to present at one of the PowerShell Virtual User Group meetings he runs regularly.  I was quite looking forward to presenting, and I was going to demonstrate how you can extend the PowerGUI administration console as well as how you can share these extensions by exporting them in PowerPacks and making them available to the PowerShell community.  Creating PowerPacks is a large part of what I do at work every day, and I get a lot of questions about how to do it, so I was looking forward to being able to answer those questions in my demonstration.

Unfortunately I had some challenges in front of me at the time and I ended up cancelling my presentation (sorry Marco!).  Still, I really wanted to show how PowerGUI can be extended and how PowerPacks are made, so I recently recorded a screencast that contains pretty much everything I was hoping to show off in my presentation.  Are you interested in learning how you can extend PowerGUI and how you can create your own PowerPacks?  You can check out the screencast/tutorial I made here.

Are there other screencasts/tutorials you would like to see for PowerShell and/or PowerGUI?  Let me know.  If comments don’t work for you, you can find my contact information in my about page.

And lastly, are there things you would like to see in the PowerPacks that come with PowerGUI?  Are there PowerPacks that you would like to see that aren’t published yet?  Let me know that as well!

Kirk out.

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Quality, not quantity, for the most part

Kirk MunroLeave a comment

When I started this blog last year I set a personal goal to post something to this blog at least once a week.  I wasn’t that busy at the time and it figured like a reasonable thing to do.  Well it’s now been about 6 weeks since I last published anything on this blog, but not for lack of wanting.  Life simply became extraordinarily busy for all of February and the first part of March and there were simply too many higher priorities taking every minute of free time that I could muster for me to justify spending time writing something for my blog.

It’s not that writing a blog post is that complicated.  It’s just that I didn’t want to post just anything.  I tend to prefer posts that are a little less frequent but that hopefully offer a little more value to the reader than just reposting what’s already out there simply because I don’t have time to do anything else.  Quality, not quantity.  That reflects how I look at many things in life.  Perfectionism at its best.  It’s a gift…and a curse. 🙂

Well I think my preference for quality over quantity got the better of me and I’m sure I’ll be crazy busy like I was in February again in the future, so its time to rethink my approach to blogging.  I have lots of ideas on how to approach this, but I’ll need to experiment a little to see what works best.  Essentially I’m simply going to try and find a better balance between the meatier posts that I like to do to share the results my PowerShell research with you and lighter, shorter posts about what’s going on in the PowerShell space and about the cool things I’m working on in PowerGUI to maintain a better blog continuity going forward.  Hopefully you won’t see a break in posts like this happen again in the future.

If you stuck around, waiting for an update from me, thanks.  I’m going to do my best to make you happy that you did.

Kirk out.

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PowerGUI 1.0.13 is now available

Kirk Munro2 Comments

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.

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