Note: PowerShell Book Limited Edition Preorders ONLY AVAILABLE as Preorders!

Jeffery Hicks, Richard Siddaway, and I wanted to offer a quick clarification on our book preorders. First, the PowerShell In Depth preorder is currently available, and there are up to 200 units offered through this preorder. You get a signed-by-all-three-of-us book and an exclusive video companion disc. The Month of Lunches bundle preorder will go on sale August 1st, and will be limited to 100 units. It gets you two autographed books, resources disc, and a fun lunch bag.

Release Dates for PowerShell 3 announced!

Microsoft has just announced, at its Worldwide Partner Conference, that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are on track to hit “Release to Manufacturing” the first week of August, with general product availability in October. That means PowerShell v3 will start becoming available in August-September; we can expect v3 to be available as a Web download for older versions of Windows probably by December (based on past performance; it could actually be sooner or a bit later). That’ll include Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2, but notably will not include Windows Vista (does anyone mind?). v3 will not ship for Windows XP or Windows Server 2003; those ships have sailed and it’s time to move on!

[JULY 25 UPDATE] "PowerShell In Depth" Limited Edition Pre-Orders… as they stand…

As most of you know, co-authors Jeffery Hicks, Richard Siddaway, and myself are offering a limited edition pre-order of our new PowerShell in Depth book. You can order from my company’s online store; you’re pre-ordering a book autographed by the three of us and bundled with a disc chock full of demo videos timed by us. This isn’t the same as the publisher’s MEAP preview - you won’t get the book ahead of time. The disc is exclusive to this 200-unit edition, and each book is part of a 400-unit edition and is hand-numbered.

Upcoming PowerShell Books and How to Get Them

My co-authors and I have no less than three new PowerShell books coming out… and a couple of different way to get them.

PowerShell In Depth

This is meant to be a comprehensive, administrator-focused reference on all things PowerShell v3. It’s available directly from the publisher as part of their Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). Under that program, you get all available chapters now in PDF format. As new chapters are released, you get those too. When the book is done, you get your choice of ebook format and, optionally, the printed book.

[UPDATED] Snover School: FANCY Wildcards

So, I’d previously posted about a cool trick Jeffrey Snover demonstrated at TechEd:

Get-Service -Name [a-b]*

This will return a list of all services whose names start with A or B. Now for me, this was a cool trick: I didn’t realize that wildcards could be more than * or ?! And Snover described these as “rich regular expressions.”

Well, not exactly. We’ve corresponded, and what’s actually happening is that PowerShell’s wildcard support is essentially a dumbed-down set of the regex syntax. Specifically, read the about_wildcards help topic and you’ll learn that you can use ranges like [a-b], the * and ? characters, or a set of characters like [abeft] - but not much else. So it looks like a regex at first blush, but isn’t, really.

TechEd PowerShell Sessions

Many sessions are now available on Channel 9 as recordings…

First, mine:

• Crash Course w/Jeffrey Snover (one of the conference’s top-rated overall sessions)
• Crash Course repeat
• Building Reusable PowerShell Tools
• Remoting in Depth (another top-rated session!)

But wait, there’s more!

- 
  [App-V 5 and PowerShell](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/WCL201)


- 
  [Win2012 Multi-Server Management](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/WSV306)


- 
  [Advanced Automation in PSH 3](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/WSV414)







I'll caution you that the videos haven't yet been posted on all of these, so poke around until you find 'em all. With hundreds of sessions to sort through, I imagine they're prioritizing the production process. 

How To Use Write-Host Without Endangering Puppies (or, A Manifesto for Modularizing PowerShell Scripts)

At this week’s TechEd, I was speaking with Jeffrey Snover in the hallway on Wednesday when he remarked, “you know, Write-Host isn’t all bad.” After he got someone to come around with smelling salts to revive me, he elaborated, “so long as your verb is Show.” I started to object - and then a subtle, yet brilliant light came upon me.

He’s write. Heh.

But, seriously, if you do three simple things, you can’t go wrong when you write a PowerShell script or function - and this goes further than just Write-Host. Ask yourself:

Sample Code from my TechEd "Building Reusable PowerShell Tools" Session

Hey, all! I was looking over the script I’d saved from this TechEd session, and realized I could offer something better.

Go to the Web page for my upcoming “Toolmaking” book. In the Downloads section, grab the book’s code samples. You’ll actually get a better example than I showed in class, and it goes further. The listings for Chapter 13 pretty much put you where that session wraps up.

Now, these haven’t been totally tech-edited yet, so if you find any bugs - please let me know! The book itself should go into “Early Access Preview” in a couple of months, I’m hoping. Stay tuned!

Using PowerShell to Scrape the Web

One of the things administrators often look to do with PowerShell is “scrape” Web pages. In the past, you had a couple of options: Use Internet Explorer’s COM object (which can get a bit fugly), or use the .NET Framework’s WebRequest stuff (slightly less fugly, but still a bit).

PowerShell v3 to the rescue. Microsoft has wrapped much of the fugly in some cool and simple cmdlets, and given PowerShell a native ability to understand an HTML document’s object model (DOM). Note that the ability to parse the HTML document tree is dependent upon IE being installed, which means it won’t work on a Server Core system (since IE doesn’t exist there). You’ll still get some HTML parsing, but it won’t be the full, broken-down tree.

[UPDATED] Tweaks to PowerShel v3 Updatable Help

I’ve written before about how PowerShell v3 won’t come with help “in the box,” but will instead require you to download help from Microsoft’s servers.

ASIDE: Technically, any module author can provide updatable help on their own Web server; you just have to tag your module manifest with the appropriate information so that PowerShell can locate your online content and download it.

Now that Windows PowerShell v3 Release Candidate is out, I’ve noticed a slight tweak to the help system. Previously, if you looked at a command’s help prior to downloading the help content, you still got the basic syntax and a reminder that you hadn’t yet downloaded help. That still occurs, but when you first try to ask for help (if you haven’t downloaded it), you actually get an interaction-required Yes/No prompt, reminding you to run Update-Help to get the help content to your computer.