How do you know when a product hits mainstream?

I’ve long held the view that an product is ‘mainstream’ when other vendors release products and proclaim “Our product Y completely replaces product X”. Some times the vendor’s statement is accurate and sometimes it’s marketing puff. But no mater which way you view product Y, there’s some grudging recognition that product X is not bad.

The product in question today is Fast Track Scripting Host. Don Jones recently re-reviewed FastTrack Scripting Host in an artile for Windows IT Pro here. This article was a re-review of the product – he previously reviewed the product last year.

Having had a quick look at it, I agree with Don that while there are certainly some advantages to this product, it may not truly be the answer to all an IT Pros’s prayers. But take a look at it – what do YOU think?

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Fast Track Scripting Host

Managing Cisco UC with PowerShell

In another endorsement of PowerShell, Cisco has announced earlier this month a version of the Unified Computing System Manager PowerShell toolkit. While the tool kit is still in beta, it’s an interesting announcement on two fronts.

First, if Cisco takes on PowerShell, that must say something about the cross-platform value in PowerShell as well as speaking to PowerShell’s potential to manage pretty much anything in your environment. That in itself is pretty cool news.

But second, it shows how versatile PowerShell can be. It’s taken 8 some odd years to get where we are now, but where we are now is that PowerShell provides a great extensibility platform. The UCS toolkit is based on using Cisco’s UCSM XML API for the communication between the UCSM instance and your windows system. The UCSM toolkit is then delivered as a small module you can import into your PowerShell session and away you go.

It’s cool to note that Cisco appears to have done their PowerShell support ‘right’. They’ve included help files, they are complying with the verb-noun naming, and the toolkit is built to work properly in the pipeline. Nice job Cisco!

You can read more about the toolkit at http://developer.cisco.com/web/unifiedcomputing/pshell-download. You can download the toolkit itself from http://tinyurl.com/43ms33q although you need to have rights to login to Cisco’s site.

Managing Virtual Box with PowerShell

Like Jeff Hicks, I rely on virtualisation for my work, and I too use Oracle’s Virtual Box. As Jeff mentions in a recent blog article, it’s light weight, has a pretty low footprint and works. In the office and classroom, I often use Hyper-V, but I have Virtual Box on my Windows 7 laptop and use it for demos, for writing and for the occasional short PowerShell chalk/talk class.

Now I discover that Virtual Box has a COM interface to enable management, and Jeff’s written a module to enable you to use it. You can get this module from Jeff’s blog site. I’ve downloaded it and will be putting it onto my Win7 laptop very, very shortly!

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Virtual Box,Oracle,Hyper-V,Jeff Hicks

The Book’s Done–Time For Fresh Air!

For the past 6 months or so, I’ve been engaged in writing a book, PowerShell Bible, for Wileys. I’m one of a team of authors – fellow writers include Karl Mitschke, Mark Schill, and Tome Tanasovski.  All known folks in the PowerShell community. The book should be out in the autumn and I’ll be sure to post more nearer the time!

Now that my writing is over – we ‘just’ have author and tech review to do! – I can turn my thoughts back to my two blogs and add a few more scripts and other entries.

It’s time to descend into the cellar and choose something good to drink tonight to celebrate!

Technorati Tags: PowerShell Bible

Asynchronous Event Handling in PowerShell

Thanks to MOW for a pointer to A Hey Scripting Guy blog entry by super-star Bruce Payette. This article comes from part of his recently updated PowerShell In Action (2nd Edition).

In windows, events tend to happen asynchronously – rather than synchronously. An event typically occurs in some other process or some other part of WIndows aside from the PowerShell console you are using to handle the event. This takes a different approach to writing PowerShell code as Bruce explains.

This section of his book should convince you to buy the book (unless like me you already own it). Go and buy it. And to save 35% use Promotional Code payette22035 when you check out at www.manning.com.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,event,Bruce Payette

Spell Checking Strings in PowerShell scripts

Let’s face it – spelling misteaks suck. Whether in a blog post or in a PowerShell script. Doug Finke has written a nice article on this subject that shows  how to spell your strings in your scripts. He even includes a script to do it! You can Download the PowerShell script  HERE.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,script,spell check

Lync Resource Kit Server Administration Chapter Published by Microsoft

I just got email that Microsoft has published another Lync Resource Kit chapter or your edification. This chapter, Server Administration, was written by Indranil Dutta and Jens Trier Rasmussen. I was, with others, one of the technical reviewers. You can either download just this chapter, or download all 8 of the published chapter from here.

There are three key aspects to this chapter. First, the chapter covers Lync’s Central Management Store, including the data stored in the CMS, how replication of CMS occurs, and how to manage the CMS. The second section looks at the Lync Server Control Panel and how it works. The final section talks about Role Based Access Control and how to create custom RBAC scopes.

IN looking at it, one thing kind of missing is  Management using PowerShell – perhaps an introduction to PowerShell’s object model inside Lync. RBAC is based on PowerShell, so using RBAC and creating custom roles is covered. With over 600 cmdlets, I would have preferred some more details in the Server Administration chapter. Call me fussy!

The writing in the chapter is good, and it’s illustrated by some excellent diagrams. This chapter is 24 pages long – and well worth a read if you are architecting or implementing Lync Server.

Technorati Tags: Lync,Lync Server 2010,CMS,Resource Kit

Reflections on TechEd 2011

I’m back in the UK after a week of TechEd 2011 in Atlanta (USA). I’d been quite ill before TechEd so just getting there was some effort – but well worth it! I spent most of my time on the PowerShell product booth in the Expo hall. It was quite a privilege both to hang out with members of the product team and meeting customers who both were using PowerShell and those who were just getting into it.

Overall, TechEd for me was pretty low key. There was virtually no sex appeal (and an amusingly failed demo during the keynote). But I suppose that that is not too surprising as we’re in that quiet interim between major OS and Office waves. The Wave 14 stuff (Win7+Office 2010 et al) have all shipped and are slowly being deployed (and was the focus of TechEd by and large). But there’s still an awful lot of XP out there now wondering if they should wait for Windows 8. Sadly, thanks to the ‘Cone of Silence’ being imposed within Microsoft, details of wave 15 are very thin on the ground. Heck, last week, some folks had to keep saying “Windows V-next” (i.e. couldn’t even say “Windows 8”).

But much like super-injunctions, the word eventually will eventually get out – so at last we can talk about both there being a Windows 8 and it coming in 2012, which means we can begin formally to speculate on a PowerShell V3 (assuming there is going to be one, etc., etc.).

It would have been nice to have had the Windows 8 announcement, as well as the news of 500 new features in the next edition of Windows Phone at TechEd, rather than a more obscure Japanese developer’s conference. There sure were a lot of big companies at TechEd getting very little forward information – and that was a huge disappointment for them and me. MS’s spin doctors need to remember who their friends are and open the kimono a bit. 

From the PowerShell perspective, the types of questions being asked on the stand differ from the last couple of years. I guess it was to be expected, but I got a lot of really great, depth questions – how to actually do clever stuff with PowerShell. It showed that for many, PowerShell is now a given and they are starting to leverage it. I even got a really good bug reported during the week – and that’s kind of cool (although I still need to file it) as it shows that people are pushing the product.

Having the chance to chat at some length with PowerShell team members is also very useful. First, it reinforces just how smart these guys are but second, it helps to communicate community concerns back to the folks best equipped to resolve them. That alone makes it worth coming to TechEd!

There were still a large number of PowerShell newbies, and those who kind of understand what it’s all about, but are not comfortable using it (yet). The folks I talked too walked away really understanding more (even if what they found is a bug in PowerShell!) and I hope just a little more excited about the product.

It was also great that the PowerShell team kindly gave me two minutes during a couple of breakout session talks to say a few words about PowerShell and it’s rich and diverse community. It was great to be able to evangelise the great folks out there who live and breathe this stuff – I just love sharing their passions and skills.

As ever, the social and networking side of TechEd was awesome. It was a great chance to meet up with old friends, and make some new ones. The PowerShell geek dinner, always a highlight for me of TechEd, was especially good this year with a lot more fellow PowerShell-aholics! The MCT community was very much in evidence too – it was great to meet so many old-time MCTs and meet so many new ones. The MVP community, on the other hand, seemed muted – not sure there was even an MVP event this year! The Attendee party was cool – I really enjoyed seeing the Whale Sharks. The Atlanta aquarium is a pretty impressive place. Oh – and the food (well the food I ate) was good – excellent.

All in all, it was a good week – I’m glad I went and am looking forward to next year!

Technorati Tags: TechEd 2011,#TEE2010

Lync Server 2010 Resource Kit

One of the neat aspects of the Lync Server 2010 Resource is that it’s being published online, chapter by chapter as each chapter is finished. I suspect there will eventually be a physical book, in the meantime, Lync admins can get the deep technical and management info direct from the web.

Today, the latest chapter, Troubleshooting Lync, was released. To get this and the other released chapters, navigate to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8c64a1e1-f0b3-479c-a265-e480875c61d8&displaylang=en and download from there. You can download each of the 7 chapters published so one by one, or get a 12MB ZIP file with all the chapters.

If you are using Lync, or considering it, these downloads are mandatory reading.

Technorati Tags: Lync Server 2010,Lync resource kit

Microsoft’s CloudPro Twitter Hour

As I posted last week, on Friday, Microsoft has an hour long twitter conversation around the cloud. The basic idea was that Microsoft and a few MVPs (I was one) would hang out on Twitter, and answer questions around the cloud and the cloud technologies. The hour came and went – and it was an interesting experiment, which I hope Microsoft will continue with. I lost count of the number of tweets but it was around 150 for the hour. The questions came from a range of sources. I do have the source data (well everything I captured and want to make a CSV file from it – give me a bit of time to write the PowerShell scripts to do it .

As I read through my notes, the following items were discussed:

1. What is the cloud and what are the economics of the cloud and what’s there and not there. The answers were predictable – some definitions of what the cloud was (and the need for public cloud vs. private cloud). Lower cost was seen a key driver if not the key driver.
2. Security in the cloud - both in general and with respect to US Patriot act. The architecture provides good provision against most risks and there is an SLA with financial penalties. And Simon May provided a great link to an article around hosted data and exposure to the Patriot act (see http://bit.ly/fj5BbE). It goes some ways to addressing the concerns.
3. Office 365 - now that it's in more public beta, there's more interest for sure. The questions looked at what features were there and a couple of things learned so far (e.g. no PowerShell cmdlets for SharePoint Online or Lync Online!).
4. Training and the Future of the IT Pro. It’s clear, to me at least, that the IT Pro does not go away in this drive to the cloud. There continues to be work to be done to facilitate the cloud – IT Pros do not have to worry too much just yet. As for training, well this needs to evolve and training providers need to evolve too.

I understand from talking to the organisers that another event like this is being planned. What did you think? Comments please!

Technorati Tags: Twitter,Cloud,CloudPro,#CloudPro,Lync Online,Exchange Online,SharepointOnline Office 365

Getting Started with Office 365

It’s been an interesting week. After months of waiting, I managed to finally get myself onto the beta of Office 365. Office 365 is Microsoft’s latest software as a service offering, which is currently in beta. It consists of Office, Lync, Exchange and SharePoint. The latter three are hosted services where you use a client to access the hosted resources; Office can be consumed either locally (with cloud based document storage), of via the Office web apps (i.e. office in the browser).
It’s taken a few days to get myself up an running, but that’s mainly lack of time! While the setup and installation was simple, I’m still getting to grips with the basics and with working around some of the initial issues. The basic opinion so far is highly positive.
For me, the office component of Office offers little advantage to me – although the cost is highly attractive. I’ve always used Office (i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint) locally anyway – and have enough computing power to always run local clients. But I can see how attractive this might be for many small businesses (and not a few bigger ones too).
The basic signup process was simple – a few web pages and the Office 365 account was created, and I was able to logon to the main portal, which looks like this:

From this portal page, you can do all the tenant management actions along the panel on the left, and configure the services with the middle panel. Along the centre top and right hand side is simple help and access to help resources. All in all, a simple and clean interface into Office 365. Setting up the individual services was relatively straightforward, but if you are going to get value out of SharePoint, you have to know SharePoint a whole lot better than I do at present.
The Office 365 Exchange part – well it’s just a hosted Exchange server. The speed is good – it’s really very much what I’d have expected. It does have PowerShell Cmdlets. To get to these is very simple, as follows:

# First Get credential for site
$cred = Get-Credential  tfl@yourOffice365domain.onmicrosoft.com
# Next create a new PS Session
# Use a hash table to setup parameters to new-pssession
$Office365 = @{ ConfigurationName = "Microsoft.Exchange"
                Connectionuri     = "Https://ps.outlook.com/powershell"
                Credential        = $cred
                Authentication    = "Basic" 
                AllowRedirection  = $true}
$s = New-PsSession @Office365        
# Note: you see the session being redirected to your site
# Next Import the remote session
$Results = Import-PsSession $s

# And away you go. Here are some things to try:
# How many cmdlets returned?
$Results.ExportedFunctions.count 

# What mailbox cmdlets do we have gcm *.Mailbox
# Get mail boxes and statistics
Get-Mailbox Get-Mailbox | Get-MailBoxStatistics

It’s all quite straightforward although the remoting aspect of this means it breaks PowerShell’s Get-Help at least to some degree. The remote session to the server is very much limited (don’t enter the PSSession – even exit is disallowed!). You run all the cmdlets from the local PowerShell console. I’ve not seen PowerShell cmdlets for SharePoint or Lync yet, but I expect they will work in a very similar manner. One further thing you appear NOT able to do is run New-Mailbox to create mailboxes. At least, I’ve not managed to. The documentation does not specifically mention creation of mailboxes by PowerShell, but that may be an oversight or just documentation in production. I’ve got a test script that fails – which is a by product of the restricted session configuration object being used (Microsoft.Exchange).
SharePoint is not a product I know all that well yet. I can use it in a basic way, but I’ve got no real experience either managing or designing SharePoint sites. With Office 365 you get a single ‘vanity’ domain (i.e. Internet facing), as with BPOS, which is nice. I can see small businesses wanting to use this for their ‘shop front’. Ad of course, you get lots more available ‘inside’ your organisation. I definitely need to work more with this, but it looks like a good implementation. Shame their cmdlets are not be available yet. I would hope that Microsoft would ensure these are working before sending Office 365 to the masses, but we may not be that lucky.
Lync was a doddle to install – just download and run the client, login and away you go. In my case, it was marginally more complex to logon as my domain account is a pure local account, separate from the Office 365 account. But with a tad more typing, I was logged in. Enabling Federation was simple, but turns out there are two big gotchas that I came across.
1. First, “Public Internet Connectivity” only  includes Microsoft’s Live Messenger (aka MSN messenger) – AOL and Yahoo are not enabled and so far as I can tell there is no XMPP gateway features either. So that means no XMPP federation with Google, etc. And the time it takes to get federated even to MSN is slow – It’s been two days now and I’m still waiting to  be able to access Live Messenger users. Fuller PIC federation would have been nice.
2. Second, Open Federation does not  work initially with existing Lync customers until they do additional work on their Edge architecture. While you can indeed open federate from your Office 365 account, and you can get it to work, if you try to federate with any partner that has on-premise Lync, it initially fails. They need to do some more configuration to enable a new hosting provider. My good pal Tom Arbuthnot pointed me to a great post from my other old buddy Russ Kaufmann that some how I’d missed. Basically, if you are running on-premise Lync, Office 365 appears as a hosting provider, and your account there does not appear to be just another open federated domain.  Russ argues that this is because Microsoft “doesn’t seem to know how to implement their own product”. He might think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment. The good news is that Russ has a fix which is to run New-CSHostingProvider to add a new service entry for Lync Online. See http://infrastructurehelp.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/office-365a-serious-flaw-with-lync/ for the details and Russ’s views.
I would have hoped that this is just a ‘feature’ of the beta, and gets fixed for RTM. Russ is right that I, as a hosting tenant, should have my domain treated for open federation just like any other domain, and not hindered by virtue of being hosted at Microsoft. If I, as an Office 365 Lync On=Line user, want to federate with someone that has enabled open federation, I should be able to do that without more admin work on their part. 
But now that we know that, I can just get all my contacts to open up their edge servers and we can move past it. As I said, I hope MS can fix this by RTM, as I tend to agree with Russ! But then I usually agree with Russ!
The other components of Lync Online, like conferencing and peer-peer audio seem find. Once Tom and I got his Edge server sorted out, we were able to IM, he’s in my contacts list and I can see presence. We tested peer-peer IM, audio and desktop sharing. It all worked as it’s supposed to. The audio quality, once I got my mike plugged in correctly, was excellent. We did not test video only due to lack of camera at my end. I will be testing this during the week.Sadly, like SharePoint Online, I can’t find any cmdlets yet for Lync Online.
All in all, Office 365 looks like compelling. The price plans (a subject for another blog post!) look very interesting. I am almost certainly going to move a secondary domain onto it and use it to learn more about the suite.  I’ll be writing more in the coming weeks, particularly with more details on the PowerShell cmdlets for Lync and SharePoint once I get hold of them.
And if you fancy trying things out, you can get me, at least for now, on Lync as:
tfl@cookham.onmicrosoft.com. Feel free to IM me and help me test this out!

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Office 365,Lync Online,Exchange Online,SharePoint Online.

IT Pro Cloud Hour–Friday 15 April

The cloud, and all it’s variations, is one of the more fundamental paradigm shifts of modern times, at least as far as IT id concerned – perhaps as fundamental as the arrival of the Internet itself. As a way of advancing IT Pro’s understanding of the cloud, Microsoft is running an interesting event this coming Friday, April 15 from 12:00 to 13:00 (local time): IT Pro Cloud Question hour. This hour will be conducted on line via Twitter.

The way this is meant to work is pretty simple: to ask any Cloud related question, post your question to twitter and add the hash tag #cloudpro to your tween. Alternatively, you can text your question from you phone – text to 80809 or even send the question by mail to ukitpro@microsoft.com. During the hour, a team of Microsoft and MVPs will be watching the questions and tweeting answers. Watch for @AskTechNetUK where at least some of the answers are going to come from (I suspect these will be MS staff) – others like me will be posting under our own twitter IDs, but still using the #Cloudpro hash tag.

For more information on this event and to learn more about the cloud, see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/gg710912.

Technorati Tags: Cloud,Twitter,#CloudPro

Call for assistance–Powershell Notes From The Field (NFTF)

I am currently hard at work writing a book on PowerShell to be published this autumn. I’m extremely fortunate to have three very talented and skilled co-authors Karl Mitchke, Mark Schill and Tome Tanasovski and a good editor in Marco Shaw. These names should be familiar to many on the PowerShell community – we are all MVPs, some of us have been around since the very beginning of the journey!).  I can’t say too much more about the book just yet, but watch this space for more details. It should prove to be a pretty good book!

The final chapter of this book is Notes From The Field. This is my chapter, and what I want to is to showcase some of the great, interesting and fun things you’ve all done with PowerShell. The chapter is aimed at showing PowerShell’s incredible awesomeness. I’m look for anything, including gotchas, that you find noteworthy. What I’d like is something like 10-15 separate stories each 400-500 preferably with samples or examples I can either include (if they are not too long) or point to  a URL for a longer script which might be appropriate in some cases).

To give you an idea, I’ve already written one NFTF example – which is my use of PowerShell to manage my collection of over 2000 Grateful Dead And Jerry Garcia live show recordings. Not everyone’s cup of tea, perhaps, but PowerShell has sure helped me to manage this vast collection – and I’ve written several simple one-liners to do specific things with the collection as well as longer scripts to do richer things.

‘What does this pay’, I hear you ask. Well, given the state of book publishing, I can’t offer very much – a beverage of your choice (and more if you submit several suggestions!) the next time we meet. If the publisher is amenable, I can possibly even get you a copy of the final book (but I can’t guarantee how generous the publisher will be so this may not be possible – I’m not even sure how many copies I am getting!).

I can certainly offer you any Grateful Dead or Jerry Garcia Band show of your choice from my collection – send me a memorable date in the time period 1965-1995 and if Jerry or the Boys played that day, I can send you the show in a format of your choice. Did you ever go a Dead/Jerry show and enjoy yourself - if so, I can provide a copy of it assuming I've got it!!I can certainly put your name in print and ensure I think you in the preface!!

If you are interested, then I’ll need your piece by 1 May 2011, and preferably earlier. Once I get it, I’ll run it through the template, and doing some minor updates to ensure style consistency. Once I’ve completed an edit pass, I’ll send you back what I have for your approval. I’ve got to complete this by the beginning of June, so time is of the essence.  

Please contact me at DoctorDns {at} Gmail {dot} com. I’d be most appreciative of a response!

London PowerCamp is Over – Roll on York

The 2-day PowerShell Power camp is over. The room’s empty and I’ve left the house (and I am home!). A very long two days, but very productive, at least as far as I can tell! Twelve folks took the challenge to give a weekend and jump into the fast flowing fire hose - and made it all the way through. The PowerCamp was promoted via social media – unlike traditional training. The delegates all self-selected and learned about the event via Twitter, Facebook, etc. There were no corporate clients telling their employees to attend. And there was no vendor paying for the class. The delegates all had to give up a weekend – which is always a real challenge these days. So well done group for making it through the weekend!

The objective was to cover as much of PowerShell as possible in 2 days. And we covered a lot!! We had a special guest today, super-star James O’Neill who did a fantastic job augmenting my solo performance discussing not only his most excellent PowerShell module for Hyper-V, but also sharing what he has learned about PowerShell as a result. In some areas we may not agree – the disagreements make great food for thought. Personally, I really enjoyed the session and I am pretty sure all the delegates did too. Those of you attending the PowerShell deep dive in Las Vegas will be delighted with James’s talk there!

This style of training is not for everyone. There are people who learn better by lots of hands on – they need the structure of formal labs and time to play (which in turn requires powerful PCs, plus the setup time and effort necessary). But many experienced IT Pros can learn by listening and watching (and of course developers can to this too although this was not a developer focused event). They learn enough to move them on to the next level and gain the motivation them to do so. They also learn about the excellent PowerShell community and how to take advantage of it. The outstanding qualities of the PowerShell community never ceases to amaze me.

Ultimately, mastering any subject takes practice and that practice has to be on the job. But in two days we covered enough for the delegates to know and see the potential of PowerShell, learn enough of the syntax to move beyond the minutiae of the PowerShell language, and most important, for them to get more excited about PowerShell. One delegate came with a problem he hoped to solve – he goes away (well hopefully!!) knowing the problem is solvable and broadly how to do it. Another spent all of last evening working through the things we covered, and I suspect will do the same tonight.

This training also does not eat into the revenue of my training company clients. Folks that self select and pay a modest amount for 2 days of weekend training are highly unlikely to pay to come on a 5 day 'official’ training course. ALL the delegates this weekend had day jobs that probably precluded them taking that much time off. Neither were they going to pay the ‘official course’ price (and the expenses involved). And the income amounts were sufficiently small that most big training company sales folks would just not bother with pushing (their commission against the low rates I charged just doesn’t make sense). I sure get that.

One cool thing, those very very nice people from Idera and Quest were kind enough to let me give away copies of their PowerShell software. The delegates really appreciated the very kind offer – so a dozen more PowerGui Pro and PowerShell plus users!!!

But at the end of the day, we have a dozen folks who leave with a much greater enthusiasm for PowerShell, equipped to learn more on their own and excited about the potential for PowerShell in their jobs. What a result! It really makes all the work involved worth it.

I’ve now got a couple of days off before heading up to York to do another PowerCamp. There’s still room, if you want to attend. So come along, bring your thoughts, problems, concerns along and I’ll do what I can to make you as excited as this weekend’s group was! York is very central to a lot of key Northern cities, and the transport to/from the event is pretty easy. We’re out to the east of York city at the wonderful University of York. I know it’s a lot to ask you to give up a weekend, but why not – you’ll certainly leave knowing a LOT more about PowerShell!!!

It Was The Night Before PowerCamp…

And all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring,
Not even my mouse.

Well – that’s enough corny poetry for tonight. Tomorrow, the 2-day PowerShell PowerCamp hits London. We have a dozen folks booked up for two long days covering PowerShell V2.0 fundamentals (and as much more as I can cram into 2 days).  This two-day mega-jump-start event has gained more traction than I had hoped for. By design, I’ve only publicised it via social media – via Twitter, my blog, and a few other most welcome retweets, plus Microsoft kindly posted a couple of blog entries. I’m not sure I can boast that this is the first ever social media promoted course, or even the first social media promoted PowerShell course. But it is the first I’ve done, and it’s been exciting. For those of you coming – see you there.

What’s more exciting is that we’re taking this to York next week where we have both a great audience already, and room for more. If you’re serious about getting a jump start into PowerShell, come along. Let me know if you’d like to book a place!

London Weekend PowerShell PowerCamp – March 19-20 2011

What is it?

This fast paced weekend event covers all the key aspects of Windows PowerShell - from the command line and writing production-oriented scripts. We start with the basics including installation and configuration, formatting and providers and remoting. We then look at scripting, managing script libraries using modules, using objects, and finishing with the PowerShell features added into Windows. The event will be all lecture, with the opportunity to type along with the tutor.

What is the Agenda?

Day 1 – The Basics

• PowerShell Fundamentals – starting with the key elements of PowerShell (Cmdlets, Objects and the Pipeline) plus installation, setup, and profiles

• Discovery – finding your way and learning how to discover more

• Formatting – how to format output nicely – both by default and using hash tables and display XML

• Remoting – working with remote systems using PowerShell’s remoting capabilities

• Providers – getting into OS data stores via PSProviders

Day 2 – Diving Deeper

• Scripting Concepts – automating everyday tasks including PowerShell’s language constructs, error handling and debugging (both from the command line and using an IDE)

• Modules – managing PowerShell script libraries in the enterprise

• .NET/WMI/COM Objects – working with native objects

• PowerShell and Windows Client/Server – how you can use built in PowerShell cmdlets

• PowerShell in Key Microsoft Servers - a look at PowerShell today in SQL, SCVMM plus a look forward to the future with SharePoint 2010

What will it cost?

The cost is £200 (+VAT at the prevailing rate) for the weekend. Meals and accommodation are not covered.

Where is the event going to take place?

The PowerShell PowerCamp will be held at Microsoft Cardinal Place, 100 Victoria Street in Victoria on the weekend of March 19-20, 2010.

Who is the tutor?

The PowerShell Weekend PowerCamp will be delivered by Thomas Lee. Thomas is a veteran PowerShell MVP who has been involved in the PowerShell community since the very beginning. He provides training and consultancy around a range of Microsoft products, with a recent focus on PowerShell and Lync Server. Thomas runs PowerShell training courses around the world, and has been a speaker at conferences across the world for the past decade. In his spare time, he lives with his wife, daughter, and wine cellar in a small cottage in the UK. His Twitter handle is DoctorDNS and he maintains two blogs (Under the Stairs at http://tfl09.blogspot.com and PowerShell Scripts Blog at http://pshscripts.blogspot.com)

What do I need to bring

You need to bring a laptop with at least two VMs pre-configured. The first should be a Server 2008 R2 domain controller and the other one a member server. The virtualisation software is not of concern – but you need 64-bit guest OS support. Thus you can use Hyper-V, VMware Workstation or Oracle’s Virtual Box. 

How do I book?

Contact DoctorDNS@Gmail.com to book a place and to arrange for the invoice to be paid. Payment will need to be cash, cheque or bank transfer – I don’t take credit cards.

More Details

Watch Thomas’s blog for any hot breaking news on the event.

PowerShell on my iPhone

I recently got a new iPhone 4 16GB, courtesy of American Express (a long story!) and have been slowly making the transition from my HTC Desire Android (a nice phone) to the iPhone. There are some observations I’ll leave for another day – but let’s just say that the iPhone is not perfect and the Desire/Android is worth competitor.

One neat thing I have found in my search for applications for the new phone is iPowerShell V2, built by Sapien. iPowerShell is neat reference tool for users of Microsoft’s PowerShell, for use on the iPhone or iPod Touch. It contains full descriptions of all the core PowerShell Version 2 cmdlets, their syntax, parameters and examples of proper usage. It also contains the complete set of “about item” help topics as well as provider and alias help.

I’ve not yet found a way to extend it (i.e. to add or modify the contents, but I find it useful to dip into and out of. I particularly like browsing the about_* files using iPowerShell.

Here’s a screen shot of the application:

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,iPhone,iPowerShell,Sapien

IPv4 X-Day Arrived–No One Died

At a ceremony held on 3 February, 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the remaining last five /8s of IPv4 address space to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) in accordance with the Global Policy for the Allocation of the Remaining IPv4 Address Space. Each /8 contains a total of 2^24 addresses, although depending on how the /8 blocks get subnetted, the actual amount of usable IPv4 addresses would be lower.

So after 30 years or thereabouts, the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is fully depleted from a global perspective, that is, IANA has no more. The individual RIRs of course still have address block to give out as do individual ISPs. There are companies with /8 block (e.g. HP that has the original DEC 16.0.0.0) that might be persuaded to give some of all of their /8 blocks back either to IANA or a RIR. And there are a lot of companies that have smaller allocations (e.g. /16, /24, etc.) that also might be persuaded. And I’m sure that ISPs and RIRs will start to be a lot more aggressive over smaller allocations. If nothing else, the cost of holding allocations is pretty likely to begin to cost more.

With better use of the now scarce resource that is IPv4 addresses, the Internet will continue to operate just fine for at least the next few years. But the writing is on the wall – IPv6 needs to happen sooner rather than later. I use Xilo as my ISP – and ever since switching to them around a year ago, IPv6 is ‘in testing’. I keep asking, but it’s still in testing.

It’s time for Xilo, and all ISPs, to ramp up and start rolling out IPv6. With the handing over of the last /8 block, IPv6 needs to be here for all of us soon. Of course, it’s not just the ISPs that need to adopt and adapt. The manufacturers of ADSL/Cable modems, Wireless access points, switches, particularly consumer grade devices, need to be upgraded to fully support IPv6.  And there probably needs to be a new protocol to do complete setup for an ISP customer (configuring not only the individual hosts, but also the router itself.  Not sure DHCPv6 is quite enough. A PowerShell module perhaps?

So start asking your ISP, your hardware manufacturer and your corporate IT department: when do you support IPv6? And start learning more about IPv6.

Technorati Tags: IPv4,IPv6

Weekend PowerShell PowerCamp–York UK

I’ve written (and tweeted) in the past about my weekend PowerShell PowerCamps. Now have two more on the schedule and ready to book. These two will be held in York, at the University of York. A great venue easily accessible from much of the north east (Newcastle down to Leeds), the North West (Manchester and Liverpool) and the north Midlands. And for those farther afield, the organisers will have a great B&B offer, plus we’ll have dinner on the Saturday night in York.

This event will be, as the web site promises, fast paced!  I’ll be covering the basics of PowerShell, from the fundamentals at the command line through to writing production oriented scripts. On the first day, we start with topics including installation and configuration, formatting, providers and PowerShell remoting. On day 2, we look at scripting, modules, a deeper dive into objects and a quick lap around the PowerShell features included in Windows Server 2008 R2.

You should come along with a laptop with either Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 loaded (in a virtual environment). The virtualisation product you use is irrelevant – you can use VMware, Oracle Virtual Box, Hyper-V, etc. You should, however, have at least two VMs (a DC and a ‘client’) so you can investigate PowerShell features as we cover them in the class. If you don’t have a MSDN or TechNet subscription to get the DVDs for these OSs, you download the trial versions for the class. See here for Windows 7 and see here for Server 2008 R2 X64. I’ll be running Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V plus a number of VMs to conduct the demos – so be sure to bring along your laptop all setup. We will not be providing computers for you – so please come prepared (and contact me if you have any concerns).

There are two dates currently scheduled in York: 26 March 2011 and 18 June 2010. Both are to be held at the University of York. See the web site for more details of costs and to book.

And for those hoping for more information about PowerCamp in London – watch this space! News should be available this week.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Weekend,PoweCamp

Lync PowerShell Blog–A Challenge For You!

The folks behind the Lync Server 2010 PowerShell blog have another fun wheeze on: The PowerShell Challenge. The idea of this contest is simple: each week, the Blog team present 4 things and you need to figure out which is The Odd One Out (or as they put it, One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others).  You can read up on the rules here.

The PowerShell challenge has been going for a few weeks, and there are still 4 folks with perfect scores (naturally, I am one of those). But you can still join in the fun and compete in this week’s contest. Who knows, the top runners might have a bad week and you could end up winning the competition. But it’s not whether you win or lose – I am finding this contest very useful in helping me to get better familiar with the Cmdlets.

To see a summary of the past challenges (and answers), plus this weeks’ challenge, see: http://blogs.technet.com/b/csps/p/otherschallengearchive.aspx.

 

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Lync Server 2010,Lync Server PowerShell Challenge