Episode 12 – Our first guest, Brandon Shell

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
Listen:

Introduction

• Jam-packed show today! We ran so long, we had to skip the cmdlet-of-the-week segment!
• We have a Special Guest, and in fact our first guest, Brandon Shell, an MVP in Automation and author of the BSonPosh blog.

News

• CTP!
  • Unless you’ve been under a rock, you probably heard about the PowerShell 2.0 Community Technology Preview. Go download it! Here is what’s new.
  • Jeffery’s warning CTP -ne Beta
• Citrix “Gets it”
  • As pointed out by Dmitry and others, “From a management standpoint, Citrix is getting high on PowerShell and intend to rewrite the APIs to make everything available from Powershell scripting.
• Windows PowerShell Virtual User Group Meeting #2
  • Time: December 4th, 2007 at 12PM (noon) EST (New York time)
  • Registration site:http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=122431
    Event Code: 122431
  • Guests: Don Jones (MVP), Dmitry Sotnikov (MVP), Oisin Grehan and Jeffrey Snover (Microsoft)

Resource

• Windows PowerShell Cookbook – Lee Holmes
• New PowerShell Graphical Help File (Version 2)– with support for CTP
  • Seems to crash on exit–Hal emailed The Scripting Guys, hopefully they’ll fix it.
• Ebook that covers the CTP available November 12th (Brandon told us after we finished recording that this ebook is available now)
• PowerShell TFM 3rd Edition by Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks –
• Jeffery’s deck from TechEd “What’s New for Developers in PowerShell V2”

Tips

• More VMWare scripting: Invoke-VmCommand.ps1from Brandon
  • List VMs and processes, execute arbitrary commands.
• Talk about Switch -regex and Brandon’s perfect exampleof a useful custom object
  • Why write a wrapper for this existing utility? (hbainfo)
  • Using Switch -regex to process text
• Marcus asks (and he blogged about it),
  • “How can I fix formatting on a free-form street address field stored in my AD? Can posh help with an output where … for example, address is split into multiple lines? Like this:
    “400 crap rd,
    suite 150”
  • Ended up using calculated properties to get the results into a table easily:
    $a | format-table displayname,samaccountname, @{
    Label =”Street Address” ; Expression = {
    $_.streetaddress -replace”`n”,” ” } }

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