Having been using the beta for a while, I was very pleased to see that PowerGUI V3 has been released. Some of the new features / fixes that I like the best are:
Create Executable from Script
One click install for PowerPacks
PowerCLI 4.1 Support in the VMware PowerPack
Have a look at Kirk’s site for full details
http://poshoholic.com/2011/07/15/powergui-pro-and-powergui-3-0-are-now-available/
Kirk Munro, PowerShell MVP, has announced this year’s PowerGUI PowerPack contest. Create a PowerPack or Add-On for PowerGUI and you’ll be in with a chance of a prize if you are deemed to be one of the winners. The prizes are high value Amazon.com vouchers, however both Alan Renouf and I will testify to the fact that winning can give your profile and IT career a real boost!
So I’d encourage you to enter and believe me you will also learn something too from putting a PowerPack together and feel good for making a community contribution.
Since PowerGUI version 1.8 there have been some great enhancements in PowerPack management. So I finally got round to updating the Exchange 2003 PowerPack and publishing it in the new format. One of the best new features is the ability to update the PowerPack from the application - previously you had to manually download the new version, remove the old one then import the updated copy.
Within the PowerPack Management Dialogue Box you can see the current version of your PowerPack:
The PowerGUI script editor for PowerShell has long been my IDE of choice. I regularly use its facility to ‘Copy As HTML’ so that I can copy slices of code into blog posts with nice colour formatting. Yesterday I was thinking it would be nice to have a shortcut key to do this rather than have to navigate the menu each time, so I made a post on the forums asking for a feature request, but Shay pointed out that it was already possible to do this.
So I got asked to write an article for the http://www.simple-talk.com/ website, a well known online technical journal and community hub around SQL and .NET technologies. They’ve recently been branching out into Exchange as well hence they reason they were looking for some Exchange based articles.
The article I have written for them is based around a presentation I have made around some user groups a few times now, i.e. using PowerShell and WMI to manage Exchange 2003.
Having had some fun previously putting together some PowerPacks for PowerGUI, I had an idea that it would be quite a good tool to use with Twitter. One thing I found annoying with the web interface for Twitter was that it was difficult to see a full list for who you were following and who was following you - you could only see 20 people per page. After Steve Murawski put together his list of Powershell Twitterers at the Mind of Root website I started playing around with some of the ways you could use Powershell to access Twitter data.
I was recently invited to record a webcast by the Product Manager at Quest for PowerGUI, Darin Pendergraft, demoing the Exchange 2003 Powerpack I made for PowerGUI.
They came up with the idea to make some videos / webcasts giving some community members the opportunity to show what PowerGUI can do. A lot of people primarily use it only as a script editor, but the management console side of things is brilliant once you get into it - hopefully these examples will help inspire more people to make some powerpacks.
During this last year I’ve done quite a few presentations about Powershell and quite often as part of the demo I have included PowerGUI since I find it a great way to reel people in who aren’t quite yet ready to make a jump the whole way to command line scripting.
One of the topics I usually talk about around this is how I (like most people seem to) initially used the PowerGUI script editor for writing my scripts, but didn’t really get what the PowerGUI console was all about.