AD User Properties In PowerShell

I spend a lot of time as a Group Administrator looking after the PowerShell forum over on Spiceworks. The PowerShell group has an active forum  which you can find over at https://community.spiceworks.com/programming/powershell,

One issue that arises often is around getting properties back from a user object in Windows Active Directory. Typically we see posters knowing the GUI interface in Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC), and wanting to get the same details. Although it is NOT new, I found a great resource the other day: Mappings for the Active Directory Users and Computers Snap-in.

This page, which has numerous subpages, maps the fields you find on the property sheets inside the ADUC MMC snap-in to the properties names you get/set using the Microsoft provided AD cmdlets.

For example, if you have set an Office address on the OU Managed By property sheet, you need to use the Physical-Delivery-Office-Name property from Get-Organizational unit to obtain that information. Likewise, the General Property Page for a user object shows First Name (property givenName), Last Name (sn), and the Display Name (displayName).

This page has links for:

• Computer Object User Interface Mapping
• Domain Object User Interface Mapping
• Group Object User Interface Mapping
• Object Property Sheet
• Organizational Unit User Interface Mapping
• Printer Object User Interface Mapping
• Shared Folder Object User Interface Mapping
• User Object User Interface Mapping

If you are working with the AD cmdlets and you need to map what you see in the ADUC GUI to what you need to use in PowerShell.

Top 50 PowerShell Blogs

I just got e-mail that this blog has been included in the Feedspot.Com's Top 50 PowerShell Blogs list. You can see this list over at http://blog.feedspot.com/powershell_blogs/

I started this blog in 2003 - and first blogged about PowerShell (well, it was called Monad in those days) on 1 Nov 2003. It's been a long run with PowerShell - since that first day when Jeffrey Snover presented 'Batch Scripting, what you can do in 7 lines of code' to PDC 2003.

As Robert Hunter once wrote (and the Grateful Dead sang) "What a long strange trip it's been".

My Next PowerShell Book

I'm working on a new PowerShell book. The book's title is Windows Server 2016 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook (ISBN: 978-1-78712-204-8).  The focus of the book is showing how to manage key Windows Server 2016 features using the latest versions of PowerShell. For each area covered, I show how to do things using Powershell, in the form of recipes. The intention is to both teach a bit about the feature itself, and show you how to manage the feature using built-in and add-on modules.

In a few cases, there is no built-in way to perform some operation using PowerShell. My favourite example is that the Printing cmdlets provide no way to create a printer pool, but you can in the UI. In that case, and others, the book shows useful Win32 console applications. In the case of printer pools, we show how to use PrintUI.DLL and RunDll32.EXE to set up a printer pool. IT pros can't yet do everything with PowerShell, out of the box - but in many cases, that's just not a problem.

The book has 13 chapters, as follows:

• What’s New in PowerShell
• Implementing NanoServer
• Managing Windows Updates
• Managing Printers
• Managing Server Backup
• Managing Performance
• Troubleshooting Servers
• Managing Windows Network Services
• Managing Network Shares
• Managing IIS
• Managing Hyper-V
• Managing Azure
• Using Desired State Configuration

At the time of this post, I'm nearly done the drafting of the book's contents, and entering into the slow, tedious, and boring part: the editing and final proofing. It may be slow, tedious, and boring, but it's very important, as any writer knows.

There were several hiccoughs with the writing, but it's looking now like this book will be published in the autumn. As soon as I have a more definitive date, I'll post it.

[Later]
Publication should be early October. Sadly, my planned co-author had to drop out of the writing due to personal commitments. Additionally, I had to scale back a bit on the contents. The original plan was to write 450 pages. The book ended up something like 650!

Nested Hyper-V with Windows 10

I've been away all week, teaching in Trondheim Norway. A nice place, great students and a useful Microsoft training course. In the course, Hyper-V features quite a lot - one cool feature discussed in nested Hyper-V.

Nested Hyper-V is a feature that enables you to create a virtual machine, and then load Hyper-V into that machine. So you can have a VM running VMs. This feature is cool, certainly at a technical level. No doubt someone is going to point out that VMware supports this, but the feature is new in Hyper-V on Server 2016. And interestingly enough, it works in Windows 10 Anniversary Update too!

Why does it matter?  For me, it matters since I am writing a book on PowerShell showing its range and depth. One chapter covers Hyper-V and having Nested Hyper-V means I can create two VMs (HV1, HV2) cluster the VMs, then create clustered virtual machines, The chapter is now easier to write.

The feature matters for customers too.  This enables you to use Hyper-V containers within a VM on a VM. And, it's a fantastic training tool when using on-line labs. The lab vendor, such as Virsoft (a great hosted labs experience!), to provide a student with a VM, in which they can load and use Hyper-V. Previously that was unsupported.

Getting nested Hyper-V to work is great news. For some time, I believed that this would not work on my systems. I have three big Dell Precision 7500 systems. When I tried this during the beta of Windows Server 2016, Coreinfo.exe suggested that my system did not support SLAT. And that meant I could not use nested Hyper-V. But it was wrong!

Here's a picture of a VM hosting a nested VM:

As you can see, a VM running a nested VM. The nested VM, which I called 'embedded' is in the midst on installation.

It turns out that the fix was pretty simple. In the host VM, I just had to issue a simple PowerShell command:

Set-VMProcessor -VMname DC1-ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $True

I had to shut down the  VM first, then reboot. Once rebooted, I was able to bring up the Hyper-V console and create the embedded VM.

Grammarly

Last year, I wrote about a few great writing aids. One of the tools was Grammarly.

Grammarly is a browser plug in for the Chrome browser which provides spelling and grammar advice. A spell and grammar checker on steroids. On my main writing workstation, I have Grammarly loaded and running all the time. It almost feels like a part of the underlying browser, but with nice bells and whistles.

I am currently working on a book for Packt, and we have a sweet content development portal. We just go to the web site and use the text editing features to enter the text and graphics. We can then output to PDF - it works well. Inside this CDP, Grammarly is wonderful!

When I am entering content in the CDP, you can see Grammarly when it has something it's not happy with, like this:

If you hover over the red squiggly, Grammarly displays a little pop up box that gives you options - in this case some spelling alternatives. From that little popup, you can click on 'Correct with Grammarly', and a larger box appears with more advice. From this second pop up, you can scroll through your entire document to see where Grammarly feels you should make a change. It's awesome.

In practice, I write and insert code/pics, then repeat and repeat. I touch type, but not with perfect accuracy. For me, at least, it's faster to leave a typo in the sentence and continue typing than to fix the error then carry on. I can then just use the mouse to fix the errors - and that works well for me!

The free version is excellent. But for a fee, there's a Professional version that adds a significant number of additional grammar checking rules, including passive voice as well as a plagiarism checker. The Pro version is billed either monthly ($US 37.95), quarterly ($US 24.98), and annually ($US 11.66). At the moment, there is a 20% reduction - but I do now know how long that will last - with the discounts the prices are $29.95, $19.98, and 11.66 per month).

On the downside, several of us have noticed that with Grammarly turned on, our content deployment system can crash. This is a pain, but regular saves, autosave turned on, and bit of experience - recovery is usually pretty easy. I can live with the occasional hang in exchange for such a great product.

WMF 5.1 released for download

When Microsoft ships a new version of PowerShell, it issues what they call the Windows Mangement Framework (WMF). The WMF package includes a new version of PowerShell, updated core cmdlets, and includes updated versions of other related components (e.g. an updated WMI).

In a blog post on the MS Site, Microsoft announced that release of the WMF 5.1 package. The blog post makes it clear that WMF 5.1 upgrades Window 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2 to the PowerShell, WMI, WinRM, and SIL components that were released with Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 Anniversary Edition.

If you are using Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, you should be a little careful installing this package. The installation instructions were changed - so read the release notes carefully. 

It should be clear from the blog post, but if not: if you are using Windows 10 AU or Windows Server 2016, there is nothing for you to do. Those two operating systems ship with WMF 5.1 installed.

Using Get-CimAssociatedInstance

Tonight I finally found a use for the Get-CimAssociatedInstance cmdlet. I know what that cmdlet does, but never had a real use case, until tonight. 

What I was trying to do was to use the CIM cmdlets to find the logged-on user. 

Initially, I searched through the many Win32_Classes and found one that looked promising (Win32_LogonSession). So I tried looking at the interactive logons:

Get-CimInstance Win32_LogonSession |         Where-Object LogonType -EQ 10

But that returned me a somewhat unhelpful response:

I wanted the username (and the SID). So I searched around a bit and found a class name that looked appealing: win32_loggedonuse. Turns out this is one an associator class. In WMI, the associator associates two other instances in the WMI database. In this case. the associator class associates a Win32_LogonSession with the WIn32_Account that is logged on in that session.

So I turned it into a tool :.

Function Get-WhoIAm {
# Get Account for the loggede on user$Me = Get-CimINstance Win32_LogonSession |         Where-Object LogonType -EQ 10 |           Get-CimAssociatedInstance -Association win32_loggedonuser
# Extract useful properties$IAmHT = [ordered] @{}$IAmHT.Account            = $Me.Caption$IAmHT.Description        = $Me.Description$IAmHT.LocalAccount       = $Me.LocalAccount$IAmHT.PasswordChangeable = $me.PasswordChangeable$IAmHT.SID                = $Me.SID$IamHT.CommputerName      = (Get-CimInstance -Classname Win32_Computersystem).Name
# Create a new object$IAm = New-Object -TypeName PSCustomObject -Property $IAmHT
# And return the Iam objectreturn $IAm
}

And for fun, I set an alias of WhoAmi - a tool I've used for a decade or longer. With that done, the output looks like this:

Happy days with WMI and the CIM Cmdlets.

Building a GUI with PowerShell

Many IT Pros are familiar with the concept of using Windows Forms and PowerShell to create a simple. The approach is not always that easy if you are doing it from scratch - automation is very helpful.

Sapien's PowerShell Studio (see https://www.sapien.com/software/powershell_studio for more information) works very well, but it is commercial. And at a price of £389, out of reach to many folks.

I just discovered a cool online site that does a great job of building a GUI with PowerShell - for free: https://poshgui.com/#.  The starting page looks like this:

This is not anywhere near as rich as Sapien's tool, but great for really simple GUI development. Once you get the form right, just copy/paste it into the ISE and away you go!

PowerShell cmdlet documentation is open source - COOL!

I was recently teaching a PowerShell course, and we looked at the definition the NAME parameter in Get-Service. It stated that the parameter did not accept wild cards. But it did. That made the demo sub-optimal.

So what's the obvious thing to do? Easy: just fix it!  And you can! If you look at the online version of the cmdlet's documentation (here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/reference/5.1/microsoft.powershell.management/get-service) the page looks like this:

In the upper right-hand corner is a little button Contribute. You do need to be logged in with a Microsoft Live ID to see the contribute icon.

Clicking Contribute takes you to the GitHub page for this document. All you have to do is to click on the Edit (the pencil icon), make the changes, and create a pull request. The pull request asks the doc team accept your update. Then send it and away you go. The whole process is automated and very quick and easy. The pull request is reviewed before being accepted - and as part of that process, the doc team can ask for something more/different. The process is very slick.

And finally, when you DO have the pull request accepted, your Live ID picture appears on the page. COOL - my face on the PowerShell documentation.

My Ten Tips For Technical Writing

I have written many hundreds of thousands of words over my career – not only work product, but books, trade publication articles and so on. Over that time, I’ve read far more then I’ve written. And in that time, I’ve slowly developed a set of rules for how I write. Or for how I hope to write!

In my career, I have had three great writing mentors: Keith Burgess, Roy Chapman, and Susan Greenberg. Keith was a partner at what was then Arthur Andersen Management Consultants who I worked directly throughout my time there (and was to work for again 20 years later). I did work for Roy over the years, he was a master at writing. Susan Greenberg was an amazing instructional designer at Microsoft and a great teacher. All these people strove for excellent writing – and each helped me to learn to write better.

My ten rules are really pretty straightforward. Some can easily be converted in to muscle memory – your hands just type better text. And when I see some of my rules broken in other people’s writing – it drives me nuts. Those authors who have had me as an editor will recognise some of them!

So here are my ten rules for better writing:

1. Avoid future tense  This rule has a couple of benefits. Some languages deal with future tense differently to English – present tense is easier. Also future tense may make the writing harder to understand. For example: if you say “clicking on the foo button will make bar happen”. So the question is when will that happen? Is it immediate? Will bar happen in a minute/hour/day? Better to say: ‘Clicking on the foo button makes bar happen.
2. Avoid passive voice Passive voice is, to cite Wikipedia,a grammatical construction where the noun that would be the object of an active sentence appears as the subject of the sentence.  Active voice, for example “Our company builds the best widgets whilst in passive voice it’s “The best widgets are built by our company. Sentences with passive voice add words to the sentence (6 vs 8 words). They can also make the reader work harder to understand the intended meaning.
3. No split infinitives Yeah – I know: To Boldly Go and all that.  But an infinitive is a single idea – splitting it makes understanding more difficult. You should avoid that.
4. What is it, so what  This is one of the lessons Susan Greenberg beat into me. It’s simple really: when you are writing about something, you should explain what it IS, before telling us why it matters. I really hate reading about some product or technology where the writer spends the first few paragraphs telling me why it was cool, without ever explaining precisely what ‘it’ actually is. Define your terms, THEN tell me why I need this product.
5. Organise carefully I learned this lesson watching Keith Burgess. When you are writing a client report, or a magazine article, you have a purpose. That purpose could be to justify a project, or to explain a product or product feature. You need to organise your thoughts carefully, progressing from premise through to conclusion. You are taking the reader on the journey. We all know authors who veer widely off topic with annoying regularity.
6. Decide on 2nd person vs 3rd person This is about how you are talking to the reader. Do you say: “You do X to make the Y feature work” or “The user does X to make the Y feature work”.  I prefer to directly to the reader, you, vs some one else, eg the user, the manager, the IT Pro. I like to talk directly to the person who is reading.
7. Gender neutrality - or not This is one where political correctness can abound. I see some writers trying to be cute and always using ‘she’, or ‘chairwoman, or those being politically correct, eg the chairperson. I have views here – but the level of neutrality you need will depend on the target audience. You do need to be sensitive to your audience
8. The Oxford Comma This one is subjective – some ignore it, others insist. It’s called Oxford comma because it was used by printers, readers, and editors at Oxford University Press. It can clarify the meaning of a sentence when the items in a list are not single words.
9. Be balanced I like to see the good news AND the bad news. Nothing I hate more than pure puff pieces – ones that just say good things about a product. Likewise, I dislike totally negative articles. I’ve prefer writers that see both sides, who are balanced in their coverage. NO product is perfect.
10. If you can't say something nice, say nothing at all  Rarely, but on occasion, I’ve had occasion to use this rule. I’ve been asked to write about products or technologies I just do not believe in. I’ve found it easier to just not write an article than write one that is just negative.

That’s it. Simple really!

Windows 10 Anniversary Edition–You’re Fired!

Like many, I was excited about the progress that Microsoft made with WIndows 10 and was looking forward to running the final version! Sadly, my enthusiasm was short lived.

I have a nice home workstation: dual processor/ hex core, 96gb of ram and 4tb of disk – and a nice pair of modern 24 inch TFT panels. I have two other systems of similar size under my desk – these run Server 2016 TP5. All three systems are connected to the twin TFTs via a nice Lindy 4 port HDMI/USB KVM switch. The two servers use just one screen, whereas the workstation has one output going to the KVM, the other direct to the right screen. Having two screens has become not only natural, but important for work. Being able to have three large windows open is now normal practice.

So, last night I saw there was an update and I agreed. Go for it, I thought. The ‘upgrade’ took nearly an hour all told. But then I got the logon screen. After logon I got my first bit of bad news: Only one screen. The other two systems on the KVM switch work perfectly – the Windows 10 machine would not project to the second panel. I tried all the normal tricks of plugging things in, power cycling everything, etc. But I carried on.

Then the next bit of bad news: application compatibility. First, Network Monitor – AE gave me toast saying it was not supported. NO problem, I thought – I have Wireshark. Second, Foxit PDF reader started behaving oddly. If I double clicked a PDF in a mail in Outlook, the file opened, but Foxit immediately crashed.

Then came the proverbial 3rd strike. I fired up a VM (The old box ran around 10-12 VMs albeit not at the same time). I double clicked on the VM, and the VM Connect box errored out. I tried again. Error.

Sorry Microsoft, losing the second screen. having app compatibility issues with key tools, and no being able to see inside my VMs is simply unacceptable. I can not accept the downgrade in functionality. Frankly, for me an OS is just a tool. The changes for me are mainly cosmetic – except of course for PowerShell (but I can get that separately anyway).

So I reverted. Foxit works, as does Netmon. VM Connect works just fine. And I have my two screens back. Sorry Microsoft. Sorry Windows 10 Anniversary Edition, but You’re Fired.

Backing up SSD Disk In Azure

Given all the coverage of the LinkedIn purchase, you may have missed the latest feature update in Azure: you can now backup data stored on Azure hosted SSD Storage using Azure backup.

Azure Premium storage allows you to provision SSD disks in the cloud – which naturally speeds up I/O operations and improves performance of workloads like SQL Server. Unlike traditional (i.e. spinning disk) storage in Azure, you pay for the disk you provision irrespective of how much you use. Traditional storage is billed based on the amount of storage actually used.

Like just about every feature area in Azure, Premium Storage is an evolving story. Last month, Microsoft announced that you could use Azure Site Recovery to replicate to Premium storage.

The most recent announcement means a VM using Premium Storage for storing VHD and other data can now be backed up with Azure backup. There is some documentation on the Azure documentation site: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/backup-azure-vms-first-look-arm/.

With this updated feature, you can now fully backup any Azure VM, whether V1/ARM irrespective of storage used (spinning disks vs premium SSD storage). You can specify the replication options to enable LRS vs GRS, define the backup goals, set policy and specify what to backup. Backup is pretty straight forward!

Technorati Tags: Azure,Premiuim Storage

Windows Server 2016–Coming Soon (and a free e-book)

Windows Server 2016 is coming soon. While Microsoft has not issued a formal release or launch date yet, the updated server OS is due out sometime in the coming months. As I understand it, we are likely to see one further technical preview before RTM. I’m expecting RTM to be over the summer and expect to be able to download it from MSDN soon after. We’ll see how accurate my guesstimates are – and no I have NO inside information.

A sign that the new OS is coming soon is the release of a new e-book: Introducing Windows Server 2015 Techical Preview. It’s a bit dated (it was released in April) but has great details of the key new features of Server 2016, including Nano Server, Containers and the huge host of other updated or new features. I have downloaded the PFD and have been reading it on my train journeys to/from London.

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2016

Finding Type Information in PowerShell

On frequent occasions, I find myself using a cmdlet and needing more information about the objects that cmdlet produces. The details are in Microsoft’s MSDN library, but it can be hard to use the GUI to find it. Fortunately, I found a cool way of dealing with this. I found the trick on the Internet but I really can not remember where I found it.

The trick is simple: I use some Type XML to extend all objects with a new script method called MSDN. If I create an object – I can assign it to a variable and just call the .MSDN() method on any occurrence.  Suppose I did a Get-ChildItem against the Certificate Provider and needed more details on the object returned. I just do this:

$Certs = Get-ChildItem Cert:\CurrentUser\My
$Certs[0].MSDN()

The MSDN() method, something I’ve added in, then brings up Internet Explorer and nvigates to the appropriate page in the MSDN library. Which is: https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate2.ASPX.

But how did that method come about – you might ask! Easy – it’s just a bit of type XML I add to each system I use. I just add an xml file and reference it in my PowerShell profile. The XML file looks like this:

<Types>
  <Type>
    <Name>System.Object</Name>
    <Members>
      <ScriptMethod>
        <Name>MSDN</Name>
        <Script>
           if (($global:MSDNViewer -eq $null) –or
              ($global:MSDNViewer.HWND -eq $null))
           {$global:MSDNViewer = new-object -ComObject InterNetExplorer.Application}
              $Uri = "http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/" + $this.GetType().FullName + ".ASPX"
              $global:MSDNViewer.Navigate2($Uri)
              $global:MSDNViewer.Visible = $TRUE
      </Script>
      </ScriptMethod>
    </Members>
  </Type>
</Types>

I have saved this into a file (I saved it as c:\foo\my.types.ps1.xml) then in each PowerShell profile I just add it in:

Update-TypeData -appendPath C:\foo\my.types.ps1xml

And from then on, you can just use the MSDN method on just about any type. It’s not perfect – sadly there are types/classes that do not appear documented in MSDN (or at least now where this little XML trick can find it).

If you know where this came from, Please comment – I just can’t remember where I found it!

Some Cool Writing Tools I Could Get Used To!

As someone who blogs, and contributes to a lot of web forums, my writing skills matter. I want readers to digest what I say, without the text sounding like I'm talking to a 5-year old. The technical content of a lot of what I post makes that even more challenging. I’m sure I am not the only person who cringes when I see a typo or a bit of appalling grammar in my output.

Today, I came across an interesting page from StumbleUpon, called ‘3 Simple Writing Tools that will blow your mind’.  I did find the inconsistent use of capital letters in that headline to be amusing. But the content was good – and very useful!

The first tool is Headline Analyzer – which does what it says. You type in an article’s headline to the page (http://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer) and then the page analyses the headline for you. It shows common, uncommon, emotional and power words in your headline. Increasing the number of uncommon or emotional words can improve the headline. The page also shows how your article might appear in both google and email! If better headlines increase readership, then so much the better! I’ve bookmarked this page!

The second tool is Hemingway – a tool at www.hemingwayapp.com. You paste your article headline/text into the page, and your text is analysed for thinks like use of passive voice, or for phrases that have simpler alternatives. Running this article’s draft through Hemmingway showed some sentences/phrases that could be improved. This is another page I have bookmarked.

The final tool is called Grammarly. This is a chrome plugin that checks your text as you type into text boxes on Web pages. I installed it, and instantly the SpiceWorks pages give me this nice editor. This tool is free, and I’m already hooked!

Tools like these are a gas!

Are Merrill Lynch Thieves?

In my early 20s, round about 1973, I received a phone call from Merrill Lynch – it was a stock broker who was looking for the ‘other’ Tom Lee. I lived in Michigan and there were two of us with the same name. I occasionally got calls for him. Anyway – while the call was not for me, I was interested. I was in my first job after university and wanted to start investing for my future. My great grandmother was a big fan of investing and told me I should do so as young as possible.

So following that call, I opened a Share Builder account and started investing. The idea was you sent them money and they bought fractional bits of shares and credited your account. Dividends were re-invested. It was sweet – I put a few dollars in on a fairly regular basis and slowly my portfolio grew. It was a nice programme and I invested consistently.

In 1975, I moved to the UK – but mail does get here from the US, and I managed to organise change of address with no problem. With currency control in effect at that time, I was unable to invest more – but was happy with the growth due to dividends. I hoped, one day, to be able to invest more.

In 1981, I joined what was then Arthur Andersen (now Accenture) and was forced to sell all my shares – except for one that I did not sell. I had a few shares of IBM and wanted to keep those. I was successful.

Since then, the shares just grew – each quarter, the dividend bought more bits of shares and, along with a few stock splits, I ended up with around 320 shares by last year. And although IBM has gone through a rough time – this is to me a lot of money that I planned to use in my retirement. I reached 65 last summer and was considering what to do with these shares. I did not need the money urgently so was happy to wait.

But then Merrill Lynch ‘helped’ me. In December 2015,they took all the shares, closed my account and now they refuse to talk to me. They claim they tried to contact me in August 2015, but I never received any communications. They have been utterly unhelpful at tracking down my missing IBM shares.

They claim the money has been given over to the state of Delaware under an escheat scheme. Well – Delaware has no record of any money or shares given over. And Merrill Lynch have refused to talk to me saying I should talk to Delaware.

Bottom line: I have lost 320+ shares of IBM (worth today roughly $47k). They refuse to help – and just refer me to Delaware (https://delaware.findyourunclaimedproperty.com/). Having spoken to the folks in Delaware – they know nothing about it.

What can I conclude but that Merrill Lynch are thieves and crooks? Maybe that’s strong language. But what do you call a firm of bankers who take your money and in effect laugh in your face and tell you to get lost? I am gutted to have lost that much money due to bankers who seem to be able to get away with it.

If you know any one at Merrill Lynch, feel free to point them to this blog post.

Windows 10 Build 14328 – Two Interesting PowerShell Changes

I’ve just updated my text Windows 10 test VM to the latest Insider build, 14328. Needless to say, one of the first things I did was to open up PowerShell and look at $PSVersionTable. And when I did so, there are two interesting changes. Here’s what I see:

Note there are two interesting changes:

• First, the $PSVersionTable variable has a new property: PSEdition. On my VM, as you can see, this is set to Desktop. The Latest Windows Server 2016 has an older build of PowerShell, and this property does not exist, nor does it exist on my main workstation (running 5.0.10586.122).
• Second, note that the PowerShell Version number has changed to 5.1!

Taken together, it looks like Microsoft will release an updated version of PowerShell with the Windows 10 Anniversary edition. And at a wild guess, I suspect MS will ship that version of PowerShell in Windows 2016 when that ships.

What remains are two questions: what is new in 5.1 (or what WILL be new when it’s ‘released’), and what’s up with the PSEdition property? It also somewhat begs the question around what is the ongoing strategy surrounding version numbers? What is the effective difference between 5.1 and 6.0? I’d just like to understand the PowerShell team’s version numbering strategy.

So far as I can tell, there’s nothing I can see new in this build of PowerShell (aside from the additional property. But I’ve only had this new build up for an hour. More fun later today, no doubt!

Bash on Windows– 10 Things I Learned Today

I’ve been playing today with Bash on Windows 10. I blogged earlier about how to install it. Now to getting down to use it. I spent a few hours today as a NEW to Bash user and found some differences. If you know Linux,  you may find some of these obvious but they do represent a difference new to Bash folks will find.

1. BOW is case sensitive  LS is not the same as ls. Windows is not case sensitive, so LS and ls are the same.

2. Getting help for a command is different and inconsistent between commands. In some cases it's <cmd> -h, some times <cmd> --h, or <cmd> --help, etc. Each command has its own way of providing help.    

3. The Unix MAN help system is alive and well in Bash. Type man <cmd name> for help. However, this takes you into a pager, from which you type q to escape.

4. You don’t have a graphical text editor in Bash. But you do have VI, and you can easily install emacs (apt-get install emacs23).

5. The Linux and Windows file systems are different. Windows has no single root, but a bunch of volumes C: d:, etc. With Linux there is one unified filesystem '/' with everything underneath it. 

6. You can see the windows file system from bash /mnt/c is c:, /mnt/d would be d:, etc. But interop is limited. It would be nice to be able to edit, say, over in Windows but use over in bash. That doesn't really work fully. You can, for example, mkdir /xxx from the bash side, and that folder shows up in windows. But create a file in windows and you can't see it from bash. I suspect this is a work in progress.

7. No GWMI Win32_Processor, instead cat /proc/cpuinfo , or  grep Intel /proc/cpuinfo (nb grep intel /proc/cpuinfo fails! - see rule 1)

8. The error messages are quite different.

9. Type Man Man and you can see where PowerShell help ideas came from!

10. Type the wrong command and you can often be told which where to find it (eg, type lsf and see what it offers you)

And since I can’t count well,

11. Getting packages is different - You use apt-get. apt-get install emacs, for example. PowerShellGet is modelled on APT-Get, it feels!

This is fun!

Installing BASH on Windows 10

Well – I now have Bash running on Windows 10. Turns out to be pretty easy!

The first thing to do is to get the latest Insider build – you need 14316. This build is not yet available for ISO downloads (although I suspect that that will come soon), so you need to get the update. You just go to the Settings setting and change over to get the Insider builds (make sure you specify the fast ring) and let it download. Something like this:

 

 

After downloading the update and doing a reboot brings up the new build. After tuning on the developer features, you then go over to Control Panel and Select the Windows Subsystem for Linux ( Beta). Like this:

Once WSL is installed, you get the obligatory reboot, then just run Bash. The first time you run Bash, it lets you know that you need to load the Bash Shell itself:

 

 

Once that is done, you can start typing Linux commands:

 

But here’s is the screen shot I love (and a tip of the hat to Paul Adare):

Bash on Windows. Real Bash. And all the tools. Including apt-get. WOW – if I did not know better, I’d wonder if Hell had frozen over.

Bash on Windows

Hell has truly frozen over. Or something like that. At //BUILD this week, Microsoft announced Bash on Windows. I was listening to the keynote over the Internet and watching Twitter. As I listened to the keynote, I kept asking ‘why?’  Jeffrey Snover tweeted, to the effect that I’d get it eventually. As usual he was right.

I get it, now.

I read a great blog post (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUsermodeUbuntuLinuxBinariesOnWindows10.aspx) and watched two videos today that helped. The first video is an overview to the feature, with Rich Turner and Russ Alexander (https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows/). It explains the feature well! The other one was a panel discussion from the BUild conference narrated by Scott. Get this at: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/C906.  And here’s another good blog post from Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html.

So why does this matter and what’s the big deal.

Let’s start with how the feature is architected. When you run Bash on Windows, AKA BOW, you are running a pure Linux (Ubuntu) userspace. It is bit for bit Ubuntu, with the Linux kernel replaced by a new Windows subsystem that implements the Linux system calls. It looks like, acts like, and to all intents is Linux. On Windows. I find the solution quite elegant.

So who would want it? Well – Microsoft via UserVoice, concluded there were a lot of  developers who were developing apps for Linux server, for example a Ruby on Rails based web site.  They use Emacs and a variety of tools to edit the source code, check it into a repository (Git), and push it up to the cloud (azure). They use other tools to do the building, unit testing, etc. The open source environment is rife with tools that a canny developer can leverage.

These Linux server devs (I hesitate to use the acronym LSDs) currently use Linux client systems. WIth WOW, they can now use ALL the tools they used to, from a command prompt they know, leveraging the Linux package community as they always have – but you are running all that on top of Windows.

That enables a couple of things. First, it will simplify the management of the developer workstation. It can now be Windows (with AD, GPOs, etc, etc), but with the power to run the developer’s normal workflow unencumbered by Windows. But at the same time, the dev can Alt-Tab to Outlook, the Edge browser, leverage Office and that huge library of windows applications. The best of two worlds.

Another interesting aspect – it turns the developer’s desktop into a Windows License. Linux at the from door, Windows by the back door. Or something like kthat

I like the concept. It’s certainly NOT for everyone – but I can see there there is a market.  I suspect that, cool as this is, there is a lot more to come here.