Episode 27 – Darren Mar-Elia talks about Group Policy

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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In This Episode

We have an interview this week with noted group policy expert, Darren Mar-Elia.  And we have no news for you today, but a lot of resources, tips, and one-liners to ease your scripting pains.  And don’t forget about Quest’s excellent book giveaway offer.  Keep listening for details on that.

Interview

Interview sponsored by iTripoli.
Admin Script Editor provides a true integrated scripting environment for PowerShell.  Advanced features include an integrated PowerShell debugger, advanced code generating tools for Active Directory, Databases, XML files and more.  Let’s not forget about the exclusive PowerShell forms designer. What’s coming up? Soon its innovative and feature-rich ScriptPackger tool will offer support for the dynamic installation of cmdlets! Come see for yourself– Admin Script Editor v3.5 is availble for a 45 day trial at AdminScriptEditor.com.
Be sure to listen to the show for the interview, it’s a great one!

Episode 26 – Keith Hill

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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In This Episode

We’ve got a great show lined up for you today.  I am really pleased to announce our guest: Keith Hill, a well-known developer in the PowerShell Community.  Also, as we hinted during the last show, your participation and support makes advertisers happy, and when they’re happy, they give away stuff.  This one is cool because many will enter–and many will win!  Stay tuned for details.  And as usual, we’ve got a bunch of news, tips, and resources to share.

Episode 25 – CTP 2: The Return of CTP

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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In This Episode

• We have a great show lined up for you today.  Don Jones from Sapien is here.  [applause]  He’ll be giving us a taste of the trade show circuit, going into CTP2, and other goings-on in the PowerShell world.  And of course we have tips and resources and whatever else we can throw in.
• We will be announcing the winner of our Vista Ultimate giveaway on Show 26 next week.  If you haven’t entered yet, now is the time!  It’s really easy, just send feedback about the show to and you are in the running.

News

The News today is sponsored by SDM Software.
“SDM Software provides innovative solutions that combine PowerShell and Group Policy to help reduce the complexity of managing your Windows systems.  Their unique GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell, provides the means to automate the management of your Group Policy Objects. To get more information about these products and download trial copies,
visit sdmsoftware.com/powerscripting.php.”

Show Us Your Cmdlets!

This little one-liner will show the most common verbs among all the cmdlets installed in the current PowerShell session.

1: PS > gcm -CommandType cmdlet | Group Verb | Sort Count -Descending | Select -First 102: Â3: Count Name Group4: —– —- —–5: 128 Get {Get-Acl, Get-ADObject, Get-Alias, Get-Authentico...6: 46 Set {Set-Acl, Set-Alias, Set-AuthenticodeSignature, S…7: 36 New {New-Alias, New-CDDrive, New-Client, New-Cluster,...8: 34 Remove {Remove-CDDrive, Remove-Cluster, Remove-CustomFie…9: 15 Send {Send-Email, Send-FTP, Send-IM, Send-Mail, Send-M...10: 14 Write {Write-BZip2, Write-Clipboard, Write-Debug, Write…11: 13 Invoke {Invoke-Command, Invoke-Expression, Invoke-Histor...12: 11 Out {Out-Chart, Out-Clipboard, Out-Default, Out-File,…13: 10 Add {Add-Contact, Add-Content, Add-History, Add-Membe...14: 10 Move {Move-Cluster, Move-Datacenter, Move-Folder, Move… `I just realized the above is the CLI equivalent of looking at a screenshot of someone"™s Windows desktop and wondering what all those tray icons do.  🙂
What snapins do you think I have installed?  What about you guys?

Episode 24 – Admin Script Editor

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
Listen:

In This Episode

• Today we’ll be speaking to Steven Behrns from iTripoli, the developers who brought you Admin Script Editor. Also on tap: news, resources, and a bunch of PowerShell tips for you. In addition, we’ve got a product giveaway, the first of many! But you have to listen to find out how to enter. 🙂

News

The News today is sponsored by SDM Software.
Before we go into the spiel, I’d like to mention that we’ve gotten some great feedback from Quest already, so thanks to everyone who has done a clickthrough and filled out the form. You do keep doing that, and we keep the advertisers happy, and that allows US to do more for you. You will start to see the results of that in this very show!
“SDM Software provides innovative solutions that combine PowerShell and Group Policy to help reduce the complexity of managing your Windows systems. Their unique GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell, provides the means to automate the management of your Group Policy Objects.
To get more information about these products and download trial copies,
visit sdmsoftware.com/powerscripting.php.”

Episode 23 – IIS7 Special

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
Listen:

In This Episode

• Today we’ve got an interview with a senior program manager from the IIS team at Microsoft.  We’ve also got news, resources, and a bunch of PowerShell tips for you.

News

The News today is sponsored by SDM Software:
“SDM Software provides innovative solutions that combine PowerShell and Group Policy to help reduce the complexity of managing your Windows systems.  Their unique GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell, provides the means to automate the management of your Group Policy Objects. To get more information about these products and download trial copies, visit sdmsoftware.com/powerscripting.php.”

Where did the time go?

First, I go on vacation (this is Hal typing). Then, Jonathan has a big project at work which takes up our next available studio slot. Then, my weekend just totally filled up end to end. I’m afraid we still haven’t gotten Episode 23 out yet, folks! But fear not, this will not become a habit. We were really good about the two-week rotation, we’ll get back to it very soon.
In the meantime, let me tell you what we’re working on in upcoming episodes:

Vacation delay

Hi all. Just wanted to let you know that I was out of town on vacation last week, so Jonathan and I were unable to record the show at our usual time. We’re getting together to record again this Thursday with an estimated air date of April 20th.
To make it up for you, we’ll try to do several blog posts this week with pointers to cool PowerShell stuff. I’ll start it off with this one from a very persistent sysadmin Ken who blogged his techniques for displaying some sweet PowerGadgets-powered gauges to monitor the CPU and memory utilization on VMware ESX servers. I say persistent because the solution did require a lot of work to get just right, and he goes into detail about those challenges so it makes a great tutorial for those new to PowerGadgets and the VMware VI Toolkit.

Episode 22 – The One About Brandon

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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In This Episode

Today we’ll bring you the second half of our interview with Jeffrey Snover. We think this part is even better than the first half. We’ve also got some news, resources, and a bunch of PowerShell tips for you.

News

The News today is sponsored by SDM Software:

“SDM Software provides innovative solutions that combine PowerShell and Group Policy to help reduce the complexity of managing your Windows systems. Their unique GPExpert Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell, provides the means to automate the management of your Group Policy Objects. To get more information about these products and download trial copies, visit sdmsoftware.com/powerscripting.php.”

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Get-Directory Function

In the olden days (i.e. when I used CMD.EXE), I often did “dir *.” to quickly get a list of the directories in the current path. PowerShell doesn’t work this way (which is good because it would be unexpected), so I had to make a replacement.

function Get-Directory { ls $Args | ? { $_.PSIsContainer } } The alias which makes most sense to me for this function is “lsd”. What, that acronym is already in use? 🙂