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Don Jones

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Don Jones

372 articles published

• 2 min read

Come to PowerShell Summer School!

Through my company Concentrated Tech, I’ve decided to run a set of three PowerShell Summer School classes (click that link for descriptions). These will be a combo of self-study and weekly online sessions, designed to teach Toolmaking, Practical applications of PowerShell, or how to teach PowerShell in a lunch ’n’ learn style format. Registration is open from now until August 1st, and you’ll also get a discount on some great SAPIEN products to use during class, if you like.

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Announcements PowerShell for Admins Training
• 1 min read

Seeking Editor for PowerShell.org TechLetter

The PowerShell.org TechLetter goes out once a month, and we’re looking for an editor to take over the task of building each monthly issue. You’ll need some basic HTML knowledge, and ideally will have a decent HTML editor. Not FrontPage. You’ll be given articles in both HTML and Word format, and will need to insert those into a master HTML document and (especially in the case of Word), fix the formatting.

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Announcements
• 1 min read

[UPDATE: It's Safe] CAUTION: Don't Run Update-Help Right Now

UPDATE 2 JULY 2013: Microsoft is informing MVPs that the fix is in, and new help files should be downloadable by (at latest) the morning of 3 July 2013. So get your Update-Help ready to run. More info. If you haven’t recently run Update-Help… don’t. There’s a problem with the help files that have been produced recently so that instead of: **-computername ** You’re getting: -computername This affects all parameters - no value types will be shown.

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Announcements PowerShell for Admins
• 2 min read

PowerShell Great Debate: To Accelerate, or Not?

At his Birds of a feather session at TechEd 2013, Glenn Sizemore and I briefly debated something that I’d like to make the topic of today’s Great Debate. It has to do with how you create new, custom objects. For example, one approach - which I used to favor, but now think is too long-form: $obj = New-Object -Type PSObject $obj | Add-Member NoteProperty Foo $bar $obj | Add-Member NoteProperty This $that We saw some variants in The Scripting Games, including this one:

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• 2 min read

Pipeline or Script? That is the Question

When I teach PowerShell classes, I often start by assuring students that, with the shell, you can _accomplish a great deal without ever writing a script. _And it’s true - you can. Unlike predecessor technologies like VBScript, PowerShell lets you pack a lot of goodness into a one-liner - or even into several lines run manually in the console. What I never say is _you can accomplish anything without ever writing a script.

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PowerShell for Admins
• 2 min read

PowerShell Great Debate: Capturing Errors

Hot on the heels of our last Great Debate, let’s take the discussion to the next logical step and talk about how you like to capture errors when they occur. The first technique is to use -ErrorVariable: `Try { Get-WmiObject Win32_BIOS -comp nothing -ea stop -ev mine } Catch { use $mine for error } `Another is to use the $Error collection: `Try { Get-WmiObject Win32_BIOS -comp badname -ea stop } Catch {

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• 2 min read

PowerShell Great Debate: Error Trapping

In the aftermath of The Scripting Games, it’s clear we need to have several community discussions - thus, I present to you, The Great Debates. These will be a series of posts wherein I’ll outline the basic situation, and you’re encouraged to debate and discuss in the comments section. The general gist is that, during the Games, we saw different people voting “up” and “down” for the exact same techniques. So… which one is right?

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• 1 min read

Overall Winners of the Scripting Games

**Congratulations to our top winners, **determined by our expert judges (and in this case we also considered their CrowdScores), mikefrobbins and taygibb, who have just won a free pass to Microsoft TechEd Europe or Microsoft TechEd North America 2014. Instructions are in your profile for claiming your prize. It is transferrable, but must be claimed/transferred by the end of July. Congratulations to our top voters/commenters, Klaus_Schulte and Poshsg0606. They were chosen randomly for this award, although I did review their comments and scores to ensure they were all meaningful and consistent.

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Scripting Games
• 2 min read

Scripting Games Event 6 Winners

We’re pleased to announce the winners for Event 6 of The Scripting Games 2013! Winners: You can log into The Scripting Games Web site and go to your Profile page to see your prize. You will be given a prize redemption code and either a URL where you can redeem it, or an e-mail address of the prize provider (they will need the redemption code). All prizes must be claimed by the end of July 2013.

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Scripting Games
• 2 min read

Call for Debates!

As the Scripting Games begin to wind down, I know that we’ve come across a number of divergent opinions, especially in the comments. “You shouldn’t use .NET classes!” says one comment, “you should have done this with a .NET class” says another comment _in the same entry. _Fun. It’s great to see those differences - but it’d be better to discuss them. So I’m asking everyone in the Games: Go through your comments on all of your entries.

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Announcements Scripting Games