Monthly Archives: July 2007

Change Group Policy Settings through PowerShell

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If you’ve done any kind of GPO management before, you’ll be aware that the one thing you can’t do (that I’ve ever been able to find) is actually change explicit settings.

Well today I stumbled across GPExpert™ Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell. This product apparently exposes GPO settings to PowerShell, allowing specific changes to be made, rather than importing backed up GP objects.

I’ve not had the opportunity to take it for a test drive yet, but I do have an eval version and will be having a closer look later this week.I’ll let you know how it shapes up.

Get-PSUGUK July Meeting

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Last night was the July meeting for the PowerShell User Group (UK). Despite the joy of trying to drive a manual hire car through Reading traffic in peak hour, printed instructions in one hand, while trying to get the pressure mix correct on the hair-trigger-accelerator and clutch, I managed to arrive a mere 30 minutes late. Which was still half an hour ahead of Richard ;)

The evening was broken into 3 presentations: Virtual Server and PowerShell, PowerGUI, and PowerGadgets.

Ben’s session was good, and highlighted the main gotcha of trying to use PowerShell with Microsoft’s Virtual Server: you have to elevate the security context of every object you instantiate. A good explanation of which can be found here and here.

Alex from Quest, gave an interesting presentation on PowerGUI, which despite its affiliation to a commercial vendor, is a freeware tool, and appears to be developing really nicely since I first looked at it. The next release 1.0.9 due for release July 23rd will have Intellisense available too.

Richard finished off the session with a presentation on PowerGadgets. I’ve always liked the look of the product, and how easy and cool it seems to be to use, but I have to admit I’ve been put off from playing with it due to the cost. I was also surprised to see that each client machine needs a license.

There’s now a MVP program, which takes the sting out getting your hands on the Creator license … if you fit the criteria. Pricing aside though a very cool product.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the evening and the beer and pizza was received as expected ;) I’m looking forward to what the September Meeting will have in store.

SAPIEN PrimalScript Snippets for PowerShell

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Just a quick one this morning. Finally delivered a big mile stone at work, so the pressures off and blogging can resume again … :)

I just saw this and thought it worthy of passing on.

I’ve not had a play so I can’t tell you how good/bad it is, but I’ve always liked the Snippets functionality in PrimalScript. It’s a nice way of building functions up into a library of re-usable code :)

They add right into SAPIEN PrimalScript, and let you type any VBScript function or statement name, press Ctrl+J, and see how that VBScript feature is performed in PowerShell

Nice :) I’m a big advocate of learning by trying to achieve objectives when it comes to scripting, but I can see this would be useful for seeing what Cmdlets are the VBScript equivalent. Coupled with the Microsoft VBScript to PowerShell Conversion Guide I can see both as being useful tools to help the learning curve of PowerShell.