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PowerShell articles, tutorials, and guides from community experts.

• Don Jones

PowerShell.org's Azure Journey, Part 4: Incoming Advice and Fun Facts

Had an opportunity to speak with some folks on the Azure team yesterday - Mark Russinovich was kind enough to make a contact for me. First of all, fun fact: Azure only charges you for used pages in VHDs. That is, if you create a 100GB VHD and load 1GB of data on it, you’re paying for 1GB of data. Very clever. So it’s charging you as if it was a dynamically expanding VHD, but of course it’s a fixed VHD with all of the related performance improvements.

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• Don Jones

PowerShell.org's Azure Journey, Part 3: Load Testing [UPDATED]

So, I’ve gotten a two-VM version of PowerShell.org running in Azure. Yay, me! My *nix skills are unaccountably rusty (go fig), but it didn’t take too long. Restoring the WordPress installation was the toughest, as a number of settings had to be tweaked since the site is no longer under the same URL (the  test site that is). Baseline I ran a load test against the existing production site yesterday; you can view the results at http://loadimpact.

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• Don Jones
PowerShell for Admins

So your company doesn't want to enable PowerShell Remoting?

But I bet they’re okay with Remote Desktop Protocol, right? And all those Remote Procedure Calls? And I bet they never even thought about why every *nix _system, ever, _has SSH enabled by default? But practically nothing else (by default)? Hmm.

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• Don Jones

PowerShell Great Debate: What's Write-Verbose For?

This was a fascinating thing to see throughout The Scripting Games this year: _When exactly should you use Write-Verbose, and why? _The same question applies to Write-Debug. “I use Write-Debug to provide developer-level comments in my scripts, since I can turn it on with -Debug to see variable contents.” “I use Write-Verbose to provide developer-level comments in my scripts, since I can turn it on with -Debug to see variable contents.

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• Don Jones

PowerShell.org's Azure Journey: Part 2

I had no idea Azure gives MSDN subscribers a huge free monthly credit - $200 for the first month, and then on the Ultimate subscription level (which is what I get as an MVP) you get  $175 per month thereafter. That starts to really justify the MSDN pricing. You want a lab in the cloud? Free Azure! Given the free-ness of it, I decided to set up a PowerShell.org in the sky to see how it went.

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• Don Jones

PowerShell.org's Azure Journey, Part 1

When we started PowerShell.org, my company (Concentrated Tech) donated shared hosting space to get the site up and running. We knew it wouldn’t be a permanent solution, but it let us start out for free. We’re coming to the point where a move to dedicated hosting will be desirable, and we’re looking at the options. Azure and Amazon Web Services are priced roughly the same for what we need, so as a Microsoft-centric community Azure’s obviously the way to go.

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• Don Jones
Books

Two PowerShell Books 50% off TODAY ONLY

_PowerShell in Depth_ and _Learn Windows PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches_ are on half-price August 25th, 2013. Use code dotd0825au at www.manning.com/jones2/ or Use code dotd0825au at www.manning.com/jones3/ Tell a friend who needs to start learning PowerShell - two great books at 50% off. All print books come with a voucher for free ebook versions (MOBI, EPUB, PDF), and the ebook-only version is also 50% off.

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• Don Jones
Announcements

Site Maintenance this Weekend (Aug 17-18 2013)

This weekend, we’ll be conducting maintenance on PowerShell.org. We have several goals: **New visual theme. **We’ll be installing a new visual theme. While we hope to catch everything, you may run across something goofy-looking. Please use the Community Discussion forum to report that, so we can ask the designers to take a look. **Performance. We’re going to continue to work on performance, with a goal of getting specified pages to have an “A” on the Page Test and YSlow tests.

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• Don Jones

New PowerShell.org Visual Design Draft, Pt 2

Spoke too soon in the morning’s updates; my designer buddies worked last night and took their first stab at the forums pages. They also changed their mind about the big black boxes, which I appreciate ;). The forums material is denser now, meaning more info per page, which should please some folks. Samples below - and comments welcome. Just keep in mind these folks aren’t being paid, so be nice ;).

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• Don Jones
Announcements

State of the Org: Website, Games, Summit, and More

I wanted to share a quick update on PowerShell.org, Inc. First, a couple of Web designer friends of mine have volunteered to do a visual re-theme of the site. Below is some of their early work, and you’re welcome to comment; I’ll just remind you that they’re volunteers and doing this _as a favor. _So be nice! You’ll notice that one of these reflects the layout a smartphone would use, which trims much of the “chrome” in favor of the content.

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