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I’ll be using these examples in my TechEd 2014 session on PowerShell patterns and practices. They won’t make much sense, perhaps, until you see the session (live, or in the recordings - and I believe this session is one of the “Taste of TechEd” ones that will be live-streamed), but here are the scripts.
TechEd-NA-2014-Patterns-Examples
Our IndieGoGo Campaign is off to an amazing start, raising over $6,300 (including some offline donations) toward our ultimate $9,000 goal. So far, we’ve raised enough to ensure we can record two tracks of Summit content - enabling us to record speakers’ laptops and voice, and to post the videos on YouTube, for free. Meeting our full $9,000 goal will enable three tracks of recordings, which is what the North American show currently produces.
The equipment we’re investing in will also support, should we choose to add it, an analog camera input and automatic picture-in-picture, meaning we can later add-on to include video of the speaker(s) as well as what’s on their laptop.
This equipment also meets an important set of goals for us: It requires no software on speaker laptops (often problematic), and it’s operated - literally - by a single big, red, lighted button. Meaning, it’s easy to use and shouldn’t interfere with the live audience’s experience.
I’m personally humbled by the generosity of our community. While larger donations are being considered “share purchases” in PowerShell.org, Inc., these contributors are essentially getting nothing in return for their money - but they’re making something possible that will benefit _everyone. _Making this content permanently available, for free, will become a treasure trove of valuable information _forever. _I can’t express my gratitude enough.
Tell a colleague, tell a friend: Every donation helps, no matter how small. And thank you, thank you, thank you.
We’re often asked if the PowerShell Summit sessions will be recorded or live-streamed. The answer, so far, has been “no,” because the equipment needed to do so gets expensive.
But we’re willing to give it a go - with crowd funding. Check out our IndieGoGo campaign, where you can contribute to making session recordings a reality - forever. We’ve got about 30 days to reach our goal. So if recorded sessions are important to you - now’s the time to put your money where you mouth is!!
Fingers crossed!
We all know that working with WMI/CIM can be frustrating. So little of it is documented, and it can be tough to find the class that has the exact info you need.
A long time ago, SAPIEN released a very nice WMI Explorer tool that, recently, was taken offline. The reason is that the company was producing an all-new, from-scratch replacement - and it’s now available.
Their new approach is pretty interesting. Rather than just live-browsing the local WMI repository or a remote computer’s repository, the tool can now go through the repo and actually create a local cache. That cache is optimized for searching, making it a ton easier to search not only for class names, but also for property names and more. Even property values! So if you know (for example) that “Windows 8.1” is part of some property of some class, this tool can help you find where it is. It also provides in-product links to what online WMI documentation exists, making it quicker to get to that stuff.
Although the old tool was a freebie, this new one will set you back $40, and I imagine it’s included with the $789 kitchen-sink bundle the company sells. While I miss the free tool, this new one is significant enough that I’d pay for it. After all, money is what keeps the programmers at SAPIEN employed, so we can’t expect great tools for zero money. Frankly, this new WMI Explorer is one of the very, very, very, very few tools that’s going to earn a place in my base VM images that I use in classes - simply because it’s so useful. The ability to search for property values gives me a whole new approach to finding the exact WMI class I need.
It’s a well thought-out tool. Now, it’s not “zero footprint” like the old one - but the old one didn’t do nearly as much, like creating a local, searchable cache of the repo. Also, this isn’t something I’d install on all my servers. There’s no need - you install it on your computer, and let it reach out to key servers to discover their repositories. So it’s “zero footprint” on the server, which is all I care about. That cache means I can even browse a remote machine’s repo when I’m completely offline, like on an airplane working on a book. That’s a huge deal for me.
SAPIEN’s blog article on the software release includes another interesting fact: They plan to release a new line of smaller tools like WMI Explorer, and either sell them separately or as a community package. Cool! But what’s even cooler is this: _“The proceeds from these tools will go towards supporting user groups and non-profit organizations.” _Well, damn. So that $40 isn’t even funding the development of the tool per se, it’s funding (in part) your local user group. That’s awesome, and makes it well worth the standalone purchase if you don’t own the whole Software Suite already.
As usual, SAPIEN offers a free trial. Give it a whirl.
I recently played around with SAPIEN’s VersionRecall, and thought I’d share a bit about the experience. As a note, SAPIEN provided me with a license key to use. VersionRecall is advertised as a simple, single-user version control system “for the rest of us.” There are no servers, no databases, and nothing complex, according to the marketing copy.
Setup is quick - a 3-screen wizard and you’re done. Installation took under a minute. When you first launch the product, it attempts to find all the places on your computer where you might store scripts, so that it can connect those to a version-control repository. You can skip that bit, but it only took a few moments on my virtual machine. It found my DSC scripts, my PowerShell modules, and several other places I’d dropped scripts. You then indicate where you’d like your version-control repository - this is where old versions of files will be saved. You can also pick a certificate, to have the software automatically sign scripts each time you make a new version. That’s a subtle and very cool feature - and it’s a way to make AllSigned a more convenient execution policy.
I selected an option to have my version control repository updated every day at 4:30pm. That seems to let the software capture a snapshot of any changed files at that time every day; it was clear that you could also manually submit an update to the repository using VersionRecall or Windows’ own File Explorer.
From there, you’re in an Explorer-like view. It includes a tab for each folder where you store scripts. I find that I like that approach a lot - I tend to organize my scripts that way. I’ve got my modules in one spot, some sample scripts in another, stuff I’m playing with in a third, and so on - so the tabbed approach fits my organizational style. You can open files for editing right there. I don’t have PrimalScript installed on this test machine, but files opened in the ISE just fine. Ribbon buttons let you open the shell, the ISE, or SAPIEN’s PrimalScript or PowerShell Studio products.
As part of our commitment to being a transparent, community-owned organization, I wanted to share the basic budget for the upcoming Summit. Now that registration is cut off, we have most of our final numbers. Keep in mind that, at live events, things “on the ground” can change quickly - so these are, at present, only our expectations “going in.”
That last number is presently the big question; we have some speakers who paid for their registration, and we need to reimburse them. That’s probably about $4,000. We have another $2,500 in promised travel offset fees to speakers doing 3 sessions. We’re trying to reimburse additional travel expenses for other speakers so they’re not totally out of pocket; the final number may be more than $7,500.
Right now, that puts us at an event profit of roughly $13,933.95. Again, some of that may end up going to additional speaker reimbursement; the rest will help fund PowerShell.org ongoing activities (like Azure hosting and so forth; I’ll share a full annual operating budget in June, but it’s about $17,000 per year). We have about $20k in payments coming up for the European Summit.
We have approximately $92,000 on-hand; much of that will go to the expenses above that are still pending. We should end April with around $65,000 on-hand - a lot of that comes from earning back a $40,000 pre-payment for the N.A. Summit that we made in fiscal 2013-2014. We’ll use some of that $65k to cover the remaining $20k fees on the European Summit; the rest of our cash-on-hand will help provide deposits for the 2015 N.A. Summit, and to fund ongoing operations for 2014-2015. We’re in good financial shape - we’re making a bit more than we need, but not very much - which is right where we want to be.
The good news is that, between the Summits and our generous corporate sponsors, we’re on track to actually find the $17k wish-list budget we’ve put together (which we’re still researching and tweaking; as stated, I’ll share the full thing in June). That means we’ll be able to start spinning up services like the VERIFIED EFFECTIVE program, monthly TechSession webinars, and so on.
If you’re attending PowerShell Summit NA 2014 (or wish you were), we have some new logo items for purchase! Buy ’em now and wear ’em to the Summit, including a baseball jersey and a polo shirt. Visit our Zazzle store to buy (or the Canadian store, to save a bit on shipping if you live up there).
Note that the items may take about 24 hours to become visible, so check on April 15th in the afternoon if you don’t see them immediately.
See you at the Summit!
Paul Higinbotham’s session on threading in PowerShell has been changed, because his content would have overlapped with other sessions. Instead, Paul will be presenting:
PowerShell Debugging Enhancements
A number of script debugging enhancements were added to PowerShell 4.0 and the WMF 5.0 preview release. In this talk I will discuss these new debugging features and demonstrate how they work. This will include the new support for remote debugging, debugging workflow scripts, debugging PowerShell jobs, ISE enhancements for remote debugging, and the new “Break All” command.
We’ll update the schedule grid and abstract document.
We’ve just finished a massive re-do of all 7 PowerShell.org free ebooks.
First, they’re now hosted in a public OneDrive folder. This means you can quickly and easily view them online, download a DOCX, or download a PDF. Anytime, anywhere.
Second, we’ve had folks go through and make the formatting more consistent, using a more modern font and somewhat “airier” spacing. Hopefully that translates to “nicer to read.” All the original code is also accessible, and available for one-click downloading. Note that .PS1 files may open for viewing; you need to checkmark the file to download it.
Uploads are now proceeding, so depending on when you read this, some files might still be in progress. The GitHub versions (which were problematic for some folks to download) will be removed shortly. Please update your links; https://powershell.org/ebooks has already been updated.
Enjoy!
OSTools - download for my class in Oslo this week.
Here’s some more: share
