Take home from PowerShell Summit Europe

WOOHA it’s been a great week.

I sat down last night my brain all fried and tried to compile a list of things to remember from the past week.

There is  much focus on “changing the mindset” of the community. Get into the DevOps mindset and become a toolmakers. This is my take-home from the conference. There’s no way to summarize all of the conference other than to say: Look forward to the videos on YouTube.

Working with PowershellGallery

After my two first posts (Multithreading using jobs, List users logged on to your machines) where I mentioned PowershellGallery.com a few times and after Warren talked about the Gallery a few days ago I felt like digging a little deeper to see if I was actually doing it right.

So I wrote them an email and this was their reply:

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“Hi Jonas – The “limited preview” designation on the PowerShell Gallery is because we are doing significant development to the site. * However, there is nothing about that status which should prevent you from sharing your code. *

List users logged on to your machines

Password policies are the best 😀 Sometimes they lead to account logouts when someone forgets to logout of a session somewhere on the network though. It might be the TS session they use once a quarter for reporting or maybe you know the feeling when you RDP to a server only to find that it is locked by 2 other admins who forgot to logoff when they left. (Off cause this never happens… we all use PowerShell…) Anyway, this had me searching for a user session somewhere on the network. The worst thing is when my own password expires. I hate when my account ends up being locked. Therefor I made it a rule to just check all servers before I change password. There are multiple ways to do this but of course I tend to go the PowerShell route. 

Multithreading using jobs

Often I have had to check something against all servers or clients. A classic problem and every time I run into the it it’s time consuming and running the job multithreaded would be nice.

A few years back I found a nice little script for multithreading which I have been using quite often. Unfortunately this wasn’t a module. And I can’t remember where it came from. So this week I set my mind on recreating this as a module and to see if I can publish it on PowerShell Gallery.

Template based parsing and progress bars

Working with wifi I have often needed to do a survey of the surroundings, and therefor I loved that windows 7 (maybe even Vista) introduced more advanced netsh with wifi support.

There’s a lot of useful information but it might be nice to have a more graphical overview. The thing is that a text blob like this is not very handy to work with.

Some time late last year I heard a guy from the powershell team on the Powerscripting podcast talk about ConvertFrom-String and the new template based parsing. And it occurred to me that you can combine this with a simple powershell progress bar (write-progress) to give a visual representation of signal strength.