Most projects have to start somewhere as an idea, and this one was no different. When Sybex contacted us, our idea suddenly became a reality and now after quite a journey, our book has finally arrived. Because most of the content of this book is inspired by the PowerCLI community, we decided to give something back. To celebrate the release of our book, we’re organizing a book raffle. Read the instructions below and enter the draw for a chance to win a free copy of “VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration”.
Whilst attending the recent MVP summit I was fortunate enough to get some podcast recording time with Travis Jones from the PowerShell product team. We are able to have a chat about the upcoming PowerShell Deep Dive Conference and the kind of treats instore for those lucky enough to attend. There’s still time to register for the conference so I highly recommend you do if you have the chance to attend.
A new feature in PowerShell V2 is modules. In this article for Simple-Talk I give you an introduction to PowerShell modules and how you might use them.
http://www.simple-talk.com/sysadmin/powershell/an-introduction-to-powershell-modules/
When I was first starting out with PowerShell one of the best ways I found for learning was to get real tasks to solve. One practical example of this I used at the time was the Scripting Games, a yearly event where you are set real world IT problems to solve with scripts. This year’s Scripting Games will be starting on April 4th and if you are just starting out with PowerShell then they are a great way to set yourself some challenges.
March 22 we have Tome Tanasovski presenting on Regular Expressions.
Tome is a Windows engineer for a market-leading global financial services firm in New York City. He is a recipient of the PowerShell MVP award, the founder and leader of the New York City PowerShell User group, a blogger, and a regular contributor to Microsoft’s Windows PowerShell forum. He has been featured four times on Hey Scripting Guy, and he is currently working on the PowerShell Bible, which is due out in 2011 from Wiley.
Want to get to grips with PowerShell, but commitments or budget prevent you from training during the week? Well PowerShell MVP and experienced trainer Thomas Lee will be running three PowerShell PowerCamps in the UK over the next few months as two-day training sessions on weekends. The cost is £200 and the dates are as follows:
March 19 - 20, London
March 26 - 27, York
June 18 - 19, York
Last year I was fortunate enough to be invited to help out Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens with their PowerCLI book project and write a few chapters to help them keep on schedule. I was also joined by two other well known PowerCLI community members Glenn Sizemore and Arnim van Lieshout.
It is often said that ‘Virtualisation is a journey’ - well writing a book about virtualisation was definitely a journey!
PowerShell 2 is installed by default in Windows Server 2008 R2. However, the other day I went on to a server with this OS and went to use the PowerShell ISE (which I switched to as my default console a year ago) and found that it wasn’t there:
Turns out that the ISE is not installed by default and needs to be added as a Feature:
This is different to a manual install of PowerShell 2 on Windows 2008 / 2003 where the ISE is included as part of the Windows Management Framework Install.
The PowerShell team are putting together the first ever PowerShell conference, to be held in Las Vegas April 18th - 19th. The focus on the conference will be advanced deep dives into various PowerShell topics so is being aimed at those already comfortable with using PowerShell. Attendees will include members of the PowerShell team, such as Jeffrey Snover, Lee Holmes and Bruce Payette - and likely also many PowerShell MVPs and others well known in the community.
I recently posted Episode 21 of the Get-Scripting podcast featuring an interview with my good friend, PowerShell MVP and leader of the UK PowerShell User Group Richard Siddaway.
Richard is the author of PowerShell in Practice and an upcoming book PowerShell and WMI , in the interview we cover the motivation behind these books and the kind of content you can expect to get from them.
In Episode 21 we are also running a competition with some great prize giveaways.