Episode 118 – James Hamilton and Thomas Lee on PowerShell Use in the Hotmail Team

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.
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In This Episode

Tonight on the PowerScripting Podcast we talk to James Hamilton of Microsoft and MVP Thomas Lee about using PowerShell on the Hotmail Team.

News

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• Sapien announces Visual PowerShell 2011. Q&A
• Tweet from @jaykul: Save 37% on @Manning Books (including eBooks). Get your Windows #PowerShell in Action or PowerShell in Practice ...http://bit.ly/97qQ3D
• Karl Prosser is working on portable PowerShell ISE
• Cool new PowerGUI stuff
  • Publish scripts to PoshCode from PowerGui
  • Automatic alias expansion
• Listener @sqlVariant just had his talk accepted to the SQL PASS summit! Title is: The Dirty Dozen: PowerShell Scripts for the Busy DBA
• Coming soon: VMware vSphere Pro Series 2 featuring PowerCLI goodies from Hal!
• User group news:
  • Atlanta: July 20th
  • SQLSaturday #49 will be held Oct 16, 2010 at Seminole State College. They are actively seeking PowerShell papers, submit yours today! Due date 7/16.

Interview

Links:

• Hotmail tips the scales
• A CONVERSATION WITH PHIL SMOOT - THE CHALLENGES OF MANAGING A MEGASERVICE
• RichCopy
• jEdit

Questions:

• SQLvariant: ##What's left of Windows Live now that Bing is out?
• AaronHoover: ## chimed in a bit late and the Linux comment, but what % of management is done with PowerShell now?
• esarakaitis: ##we have over 3,000 vm's we manage via powershell, we find that cmd-lets take too much time as compared to direct API calls, how do you handle it?
• philiplavoie: ## will there be a powershell command line tool such as googleCL for hotmail/live mail done in powershell for us users? i.e http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/
• pcgeek86: ## Do they use code signing certificates to sign all their scripts?
• SQLvariant: ## Does the Hotmail team go beyond using PowerShell to just script?  Do they make interfaces that have PowerShell underneath like SCVMM?
• AaronHoover: ## primarily monitor with WMI, or more?
• SQLvariant: ##Does the team build any internal GUI tools that are built via PowerShell and/or have PowerShell underneath
• esarakaitis: ##do you use service accounts? if so, how do you manage passwords with your powershell scripts?
• AaronHoover: ##piggybacking on esarakaitis ? --- Do you usse 2k8 MSA accounts for service passwords?
• SQLvariant: ##Can you expand on the "Visualization through HTML."
• philiplavoie: ## do they use powershell for any automated testing of new depoys / releases? load tests, scalability, failover, etc?
• glnsize: ## was the switch to powershell a directive, or was it natural.
• SQLvariant: @bj11 ## doe you use PowerShell in any of those XML generation tasks or rendering steps?
• glnsize: ## when can I expect to see a hotmail provider 🙂
• SQLvariant: @bj11 ##can you speak to any chalenges in working with large amounts of XML with PowerShell.  Do you run the scripts to gather from your desktops or a big server?
• esarakaitis: ##what complications have you encountered using powershell? i know using a code repository was a stumbling block for us
• glnsize: ## given your scale what's your opinion on v2 remoting.  have you used it and how has it performed for you...  (arrived late sorry if already covered)
• SQLvariant: ##any best practices he wants to mention when dealing / parsing large amounts of XML?
• esarakaitis: ##whats your favorite PS editor? (please say notepad++)
• AaronHoover: ## is the WMI the primary way of gathering data?
• esarakaitis: ##any hot PS profile tips?
• esarakaitis: ##do you find yourself using built in cmd-lets or writing custom functions, etc..
• philiplavoie: ## what limitations have you guys found with PS> where you've just needed to go another route?
• AaronHoover: ## earlier there was a comment of *only* about 200 servers at a time, why not more?
• Toshana: ## Are you using the readily available cmdlets, or custom written cmdlets or imported .net assemblies 
• AaronHoover: ## thoughts to 'sell' ITIL when the org 'looked' at it and believe it is not for us?
• SQLvariant: ##Bank of America had a comercial stating that they had *at leat* 4 data centers staffed and capable of running the whole company at any given time...
• SQLvariant: ##How do you go about managing whose controlling what with which script in a scenario like that?

Superhero: superman / flight

This segment is brought to you by SAPIEN Technologies.

• Checking free diskspace on Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) with PowerShell: http://bit.ly/b1AMR7
• @beefarino posted his "PowerShell as a Tools Platform" slide deck from Codestock 2010.
• Inspecting Deleted AD Objects before Restore
• Ed Wilson spoke to the Tampa PowerShell User Group today (7/8) about best practices and you can access the Live Meeting recording here.
• cspshell: 21 User Information Commands to Run Before You Die http://bit.ly/9QJ16l
• James O'Neil explorers the Image module from the PowerShellPack

This segment is brought to you by Serverfault.com!

• Pull DNS data with PowerShell
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