Today marks another exciting milestone for PowerGUI, as we release a public beta of PowerGUI Pro 3.0 to the web. We"™ve been working very hard on this release, and it includes a lot of new and improved features.  The highlights of this release are shown below.
MobileShell Now Supports PowerPack Rendering
A lot of our customers have been requesting this feature for a while (myself included!). With PowerGUI Pro 3.0, you can now expose PowerPacks to MobileShell users! An xml document is used to provide role-based access control (RBAC) to PowerGUI PowerPacks. You simply associate PowerPack files with Active Directory users or groups, and when a user logs in they will see the PowerPacks that are configured for them! Here"™s a screenshot showing the top level of MobileShell, where you can see the PowerPacks that have been exposed to this user:
Next week I"™ll be at the TechEd 2011 conference in Atlanta. During this event I"™ll be doing an Ask the Experts session on Tuesday, May 17, 2011 in the Quest Software booth from 12:30-1:00PM. If you want to get the latest news on PowerGUI® Pro and PowerGUI®, come to that session! I have some really cool things I"™ve been dying to show you, so please stop by and say Hello! If you can"™t make that session, we"™ll be demoing PowerGUI Pro all week in the Quest booth, so stop by if you want a quick look at what we"™ve been working on.
TechEd North America 2011 is coming up fast next month, so I wanted to let you know how you can learn more about PowerShell while at the conference. PowerShell has continually had a great presence at TechEd events, and this year is no exception. Just searching the TechEd schedule builder using the keyword “PowerShell” reveals 7 pre-event online webcasts, 2 pre-event virtual labs, 4 pre-con seminars, 2 birds of a feather discussions, 5 interactive discussions, 16 breakouts, and 9 hands-on labs this year! Those are not all specifically focused on PowerShell, but they definitely show the amount of attention that PowerShell gets at a conference like this.
Today is Earth Day 2011, and you can celebrate your green side in style with the latest PowerGUI® wallpaper. As an ecoholic myself, this wallpaper is definitely among my favorites.
Show your Earth Day pride, and download this beautiful desktop wallpaper today! If it doesn"™t suit your style, check out the rest of the desktop wallpaper images we have in the Wallpaper category on PowerGUI.org. There are plenty to choose from!
Today marks the beginning of Microsoft"™s 2011 Scripting Games. The Scripting Games are a great way to have fun learning more about Windows PowerShell. There are even great prizes available to be won. There are 10 events, with a beginner and an advanced category for each event.
That"™s pretty much all there is to it. You can participate in both the beginner and the advanced categories, or you can spend all of your time focused on one category. You can enter solutions for all events in a category, or you can cherry pick the events you have time for and enter only those. You can start today with the first event, or join in later once the competition is already underway. There are really no limitations on how much or how little that you have to participate in the Scripting Games. Some prizes are available for the highest ranking participant, but others can be won simply by participating in a single event, so throw your hat into the ring and learn more about PowerShell while having fun and you might even win something.
Today is PowerGUI"™s 4th birthday, and what would a birthday be without cake? The awesome graphic artists that provide me with all of our fun desktop wallpaper for PowerGUI have done it again with a new desktop wallpaper image to celebrate PowerGUI"™s birthday. You can download it from the downloads page on PowerGUI.org, or you can click on this picture to download a high-resolution version directly:
It"™s hard to believe it"™s been 4 years already since PowerGUI was first made available for download on March 28, 2007. What an amazing 4 years it has been too! What started out as a free extensible Administrative Console based on Windows PowerShell has grown into an award winning product that also includes a free extensible Script Editor with tons of useful features like Intellisense, syntax highlighting, script snippets, script signing, and many, many more. There"™s even a Pro version called PowerGUI® Pro that adds Version Control, Easy Remote Script Execution, and a component called MobileShell that allows you to perform systems management from your handheld device!
Recently Adam Driscoll of PowerGUI VSX fame was a guest on the .NET Rocks! podcast show, chatting with Carl and Richard about his TFS plugin for Android, PowerShell, PowerGUI, and PowerGUI VSX. Today that show was made available for download, so head on over to the .NET Rocks! page listen to Adam, Carl and Richard in Episode 647 of .NET Rocks!
Spring is here already, and even though it doesn"™t seem like it"™s Spring everywhere just yet (it has been snowing most of the day here in Ottawa), with the change in seasons comes a change in desktop wallpaper. The Spring 2011 wallpaper for PowerGUI Pro and PowerGUI is now available:
To download this wallpaper, simply visit the PowerGUI downloads page and scroll down to see all of the sizes and varieties that are available. We have Fall wallpaper there as well for our friends in the southern hemisphere. As always, all of our wallpaper images are stored in the Wallpaper folder on PowerGUI.org, so if you want to use one from a previous year or a different season or holiday, take a look around"¦there are currently 27 different varieties to choose from.
Last week Hal Rottenberg and Jonathan Walz recorded another great episode of the PowerScripting Podcast, this time with Jeffrey Snover and Kenneth Hansen as guests. Jeffrey and Kenneth talk about PowerShell of course, but also discuss the upcoming PowerShell Deep Dive event. You can find the link to listen to the podcast along with the show notes here.
This podcast is a great source of PowerShell news and I highly recommend listening to it regularly. It"™s a great way to pass the time during your daily commute to and from work. There are 141 episodes so far, with tons of great interviews and content, so check out this podcast when you have some time. It"™s definitely worth it.
Testing out my first WordPress blog post after the switch from Windows Live Spaces (sniff, I will miss you) to WordPress. Regarding the MVP Summit last week, I can"™t really talk about much due to just about everything being NDA, NDA, NDA! I will say that I"™m excited about the future of PowerShell! Probably the most fun part was hanging out with the other PowerShell MVPs for a week.
It seems to me that Microsoft still values their relationship with the MVPs as evidenced by the party they arranged for MVPs last Wednesday:
