After just reading Dmitry’s post about Scotty getting hit by a train, I’m still trying to digest that it happened, and trying to find out more.

I would never claim to be best mates with Scotty, but we’ve chatted at the PowerShell UG meetings, and as I used to live around the corner from him, we’ve shared a car journey home (when I was off the bike and using a hire car).

During this time we’ve had some interesting conversations and I found him to be very switched on, and a “nice-guy”.

I’d like to join Dmitry in wishing Scotty all the best, and hope he pulls through this ok!!

The general consensus around the community is that Jeffrey is a remarkably down to earth guy, pleasant, and basically just a genuine nice guy. I almost hate to admit it, but just from that short time on hearing his presentation last night that I have to agree. Considering PowerShell’s success both within Microsoft and in the Community/Vendor’s it’s surprising that this is the case. A pleasant surprise all the same.

Anyway, enough of the JS fanboi talk ;), what about PowerShell V2?

I’m hoping to have a closer look at Jeffrey’s slide deck to expand on this in more detail at some point, but I’ll touch on a few of the area’s that I saw last night and appealed to me.

Script Cmdlets
In V1 if you want to create a cmdlet, you need to write them in C# of VB(.Net?). As I’m not a developer/Programmer I never really looked at this idea in any detail. However, the demo Jeffrey gave on this last night reveals that with very little effort you can develop cmdlets written in PowerShell that provide some very nice added value to your scripts.

With V2 I can see that my library of common functions which i dot source in specific scripts, will probably be rewritten as script cmdlets and dot sourced. I’ll try and show some specific examples at a later date.

Restricted RunSpaces
Now, I’m not convinced I have the right idea here, so bear with me. In V2 there is the ability to create a name space with restricted (read: subset of the PowerShell language available) access to PoSH. Now the Administrator in me immediately thinks delegation of administration. Kind of a custom-MMC idea that would allow me to get 1st or 2nd line support run PowerShell scripts, but only the ones i delegate.

I suspect that this functionality is much more fundemental than this though and perhaps, this is more of hearing what I wanted to hear in this case? ;)

PowerShell Editor
There is a lot of 3rd party work going on in this space, and I believe MS are being careful on what they offer here. From the demo I saw last night though I would happily add the MS editor to my list of tools. It’s been made clear that this will only have basic functionality, and will never compete with offering’s being promoted by partners, but it has a couple of nice features that I personally found attractive:
- multiple runspaces available interactively
- type your code in the top half of the editor and have the execution results displayed in the lower half.
- functionality to highlight part of a script and by pressing F5 just run the highlighted element – whether thats part of a line, a few lines or as much of the script as you want.
- colour highlighting (I don’t know if brace matching is supported or likely to be)
- Intellisense will be added later on.

Where is PowerShell going?
What I found most interesting here is that Jeffrey revealed where the PoSH team want to take PowerShell. In particular there will be a lot of focus on how and where the end user will want to run their scripts. Whereas normally, this would lie within the remit of the host OS, they want to take ownership and provide the mechanisms for this to work in a more integrated way.

Anyone who has administered Windows for a period of time, is aware that the GUI is fine for administering one server, but if you want to make a change to all the servers across your estate? Now, these aren’t new challenges we are suddenly being faced with. I’ve been tackling these for nearly ten years. What I find interesting is that it feels like this is the first time Microsoft are really acknowledging the challenges we face, and are working towards making this a whole lot easier. I don’t think this is something that we are going to see overnight, but it feels like a great start!

The one thing I disagree with Jeffrey on, is his thought that the CTP isn’t for everyone. Personally, I believe that anyone who is running PowerShell (not in live here!) should switch over to the CTP. Why? Well, because V2 replaces V1, and as such all V1 functionality shouldn’t have changed. It seems to me the best way to identify any problems under V1 is to get the widest test base looking at it as possible IMHO.

What are your thought’s on V2 and the MS roadmap?

Tonight is the User Group meeting, and it’s the groups 1st anniversary!! Well done, to Richard and Steve, and all the presenters over the last 12 months.

For the last meeting I’d organised a few bottles of Microsoft Reserve wine from Stormhoek, courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. It was decided to hold off using it, and saving them for tonight’s meeting, so I’m looking forwards to seeing what it’s like.

Talking of looking forward’s, I’m also keen to hear Jeffrey Snover’s talk this evening too.

As has become the standard now, if you can’t make it in person you can still join us in Live Meeting. :)

Hope to see you there.

I’ll write up the meeting soon.

[Updated 27 Nov 2007]

I’ve put the presentation inside a zip file. This should resolve any issues. Please let me know ..

Any comments on either the night, or the attached PowerPoint are welcome ….
Group Policy Management with PowerShell

As much as I’d rather continue presenting to an empty room, there will be some good presenters there tonight, and so to be fair to them I’ll pass on the Live Meeting details for anyone who can’t make it to the event, but would like to join in all the same!

The November meeting is Tuesday 20th November starting at 6.30pm GMT

Live meeting link is

https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft1/join?id=T2CWTF&role=attend

Wish me luck! ;)

This may have changed since I last spoke to Richard, but I believe there are three presentations scheduled:

- Ben Pierce
- James O’Neill
- Adam Bell

Yes. I somehow managed to get myself involved with a couple of guys that apparently do know what they are talking about. I don’t know what the guys have planned, but my session will be on “Managing Group Policy with PowerShell”

We’ve also got a few sponsors for the next meeting, and a few goodies to give away, but more on that when I get the official nod on what’s been arranged ;)

Oh, and distance is no longer an excuse. Employing the wonders of technology, the next session will be broadcast live and unedited to your screens via Live Meeting. Eeek!

I’ll post more specifics when I get confirmation over the next couple of days!

[Update - 19 Oct]

While I’m waiting for the official news to filter through I would like to say a quick thank you to Darren Mar-Elia a.k.a. The GPO Guy from SDM Software for sponsoring the refreshments at our next meeting, and for sending the UG some schwag :)

If you’re planning on attending the meet you’ll get a glimpse of what their GPExpert™ Scripting Toolkit for PowerShell can do during my session.

Richard covered two topics: “PowerShell and SQL”, and “PowerShell and Exchange 2007″. I don’t have much to do with either product so I found the sessions quite interesting.

After some technical-tinkering we even managed to get Live Meeting working so that you could attend in virtual presence if a physical one was a bit challenging. This was announced pretty late in the day, but we still had a couple of people connect in This should be fully operational for the November meeting so that should offer people much more flexibility if they want to see what these things are about! Thanks Steve!

After the meeting we had a conversation on the meetings format, location etc going forwards. I’ve had people say that they’ve been unable to attend due to them being held in Reading. We discussed alternative venues, and I think Richard’s going to investigate what level of interest there is for a central London meeting.

In an effort to promote the group more, Steve has (foolishly?) volunteered to try and encourage vendors/sponsors/anyone to provide swag to promote their PowerShell related products. This seemed to work really well in the last meeting when PowerGadgets offered full version of their product to attendees. It’s an easy PR win for the company and as a bonus we get something to play with :)

As a final note, I’ve confirmed with Richard that I will present a small session in the November meeting. I’ve not put anything together yet, but the topic will be “Managing Group Policy with PowerShell”. A new thing for me, but I figure it’s time to step outside of my comfort zone.

Given the choice (and obviously your geographical challenges) where would you prefer a UG meeting – London, Reading, Live Meeting?

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.