PowerShell Samples in TechNet

When I first started getting into PowerShell, I browsed the TechNet and MSDN libraries to find samples that illustrated the use of various MS technologies. To get better at PowerShell, I then converted these MSDN/TechNet samples into PowerShell, posted them to the Microsoft site as well to my own http://pshscripts.blogspot.com blog site.

At the time I began doing this, there was a nice library page for both TechNet and MSDN which showed a tag cloud of the samples that had been tagged and a leader board showing who’d submitted the most updates. With the work noted above, I quickly took top spot – and slowly but surely created a huge gap between me and the next busiest contributors (at time I had contributed more content to the Technet site than the next 9 together). For reasons I’ve never been told, much of this was taken away – there is no leader board any more, the tag cloud(s) are gone and the ability to add community content is much diminished.

Having said that, today I noticed something that really made me happy. Real PowerShell samples in Technet.  If you look at the page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394585(v=vs.85).aspx, you see a bunch of tasks you can undertake using WMI. In the days gone by,  had added a bunch of samples here, recoding the VB script samples into PowerShell.  What surprised me is that all MY samples are gone, but: there are now proper PowerShell samples included in some of the samples. Look, for example at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394600(v=vs.85).aspx – which shows using the registry – you can now see the samples where they belong.

In converting my samples to integrated samples, Microsoft has removed the attribution and has made some silly errors. For example, on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394600(v=vs.85).aspx?cs-save-lang=1&cs-lang=windows%2bpowershell#code-snippet-1 (on he first sample, $computer is defined but is not used for example). And someone has taken the attributes (like who wrote the sample) off.

It’s great to see samples using PowerShell being added into the TechNet library – long may this continue.

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