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Don Jones

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Don Jones

372 articles published

• 1 min read

PowerShell Great Debate: "Fixing" Output

When should a script (or more likely, function) output raw data, and when should it “massage” its output? The classic example is something like disk space. You’re querying WMI, and it’s giving you disk space in bytes. Nobody cares about bytes. Should your function output bytes anyway, or output megabytes or gigabytes? If you output raw data, how would you expect a user to get a more-useful version? Would you expect someone running your command to use Select-Object on their own to do the math, or would you perhaps provide a default formatting view (a la what Get-Process does) that manages the math?

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• 2 min read

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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• 6 min read

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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• 1 min read

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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• 3 min read

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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• 5 min read

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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• 1 min read

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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Books
• 1 min read

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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Announcements
• 1 min read

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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