PowerShell

royal

Few months ago I read 3/4 of a PowerShell book till I was tasked at work to start OCS. Now that I feel rather comfortable with OCS, I want to get back into going through the book again. I'm about to purchase a really nice IDE called Admin Script Editor. It got higher ratings than PrimalScript in Windows IT Pro and I can see why. Admin Script Editor is amazing (form designer, script compare, wmi wizard, adsi wizard, etc...).

I purchased two books for PowerShell:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-PowerShell-Programming-Absolute-Beginner/dp/1598633546/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218256208&sr=8-2
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Windows-PowerShell-Exchange-Programmer/dp/0470226447/ref=pd_bbs_sr_9?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218256208&sr=8-9

So what are some good sites that you like for PowerShell?

Microsoft PowerShell Site
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx

Microsoft PowerShell Scripting Repository
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/default.mspx?mfr=true

MyITForum Scripting Repository
http://www.myitforum.com/myITWiki/Default.aspx?Page=WPScripts&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1


For those that want a couple good VBScript Repositories:
http://cwashington.netreach.net/
http://activexperts.com/activmonitor/windowsmanagement/adminscripts/usersgroups/users/

dynamik

One thing I like to do for programming, is use O'Reilly's Cookbook series. I'll just do one "recipe" a day. It usually only takes a few minutes, and it really helps to learn the language and get a better understanding of what it is capable of. You should probably have at least an intermediate level of knowledge in whatever language before trying this. Some of the examples are really basic, but they get be quite complex as well. They have Cookbooks for anything from Javascript to Perl to C#, etc.

Here's the one for Powershell: http://www.amazon.com/Windows-PowerShell-Cookbook-Exchange-2007/dp/0596528493/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218277156&sr=8-1

Nice links. I'll have to check out that IDE.

Edit: Looks slick. Which version are you thinking about going with?

nel

Thanks for the links royal. Some good stuff there. i think i'll have to take a peek later.

royal

Here's another great site with very good beginner tutorials and scripts that are not too complicated to learn from:
http://www.powershellpro.com/powershell-news/

Dynamik, I e-mailed my boss telling him I'd like the IDE. I told him since I'm not a big scripter yet, I'd like the Standard and upgrade to Enterprise in the future to get the form designer and ADSI Wizard. Still awaiting a reply.

astorrs

I've been a fan of PrimalScript for about 4 years (I have 2007 Enterprise currently) but I will have to give ASE another look (it used to suck ).

royal, do you have a link to that WinITPro article you were refering to? I'd be curious to see what they felt was better with ASE.

royal

Here you go:
http://windowsitpro.com/Windows/Articles/ArticleID/99542/pg/5/5.html

I don't think you'll be able to read the entire article if you don't have a subscription account though.

astorrs

royal wrote:

Here you go:
http://windowsitpro.com/Windows/Articles/ArticleID/99542/pg/5/5.html

I don't think you'll be able to read the entire article if you don't have a subscription account though.

Thanks royal, I'll check it out and see if it's worth switching to.

royal

Just downloaded Primalscript professional trial. The ADSI Wizard and WMI Wizard don't even support PowerShell. Seems like Primalscript is pretty useless for PowerShell and ASE are much more devoted to it. I think I'll be going with ASE.

Silentsoul

I keep hearing about Powershell. If i was going to learn scripting or a language do you guys recommend learning Powershell for a windows environment over VB or Perl? Which books do you guys find the best the o'reilly series or another? My boss is on top of me to get some scripting experience to help automate some task around the office.

Thanks again

royal

Silentsoul, check out powershellpro.com. He has a bunch of beginner tutorials and reviews a lot of the powershell books out there.

I am brand new to scripting (no VBscript knowledge) so I picked up the following book:
Windows PowerShell Programming - for the absolute beginner

I'm about 3/4 done and so far it's really good.

The next book I will get is:
Windows PowerShell in Action

This book was written by one of the lead programmers on PowerShell. This book is supposed to be the best PowerShell book out there and the code is supposedly very well constructed and explained.

I also purchased the PowerShell book for Exchange so I will probably go through both these books together. I'm also debating on the PowerShell Cookbook.

HeroPsycho

If you're looking for a PowerShell script tool, make sure you check out the free and awesome PowerGUI.

www.powergui.org

royal

Yep, I have actually been using PowerGUI. I figured once I need to start working with forms after learning more about working with .net, that I will get primalscript or ase depending on which has better features at that time.

HeroPsycho

I'm messing around with the PowerShell pack for VMware. Sooooo freakin' cool! Love me some PowerGui and Powershell!

astorrs

HeroPsycho wrote:

I'm messing around with the PowerShell pack for VMware. Sooooo freakin' cool! Love me some PowerGui and Powershell!

Yeah sure beats the Perl toolkit eh?

jbaello

Very cool Royal, I just added all of this stuff on my MCITP resources

royal

Awesome, Sapien Technologies, the creator of Primalscript, released a free version of a PowerShell GUI builder!!!!

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/scriptfanatic/archive/2008/11/05/free-gui-builder-tool-for-powershell.aspx

Mishra

I can't imagine how far you are getting in your powershell abilities... You are so techincal and it seems like you have put a lot of time into this.. I'm scared of the firestorm you probably are close to releasing. ^_^

royal

Mishra wrote:

I can't imagine how far you are getting in your powershell abilities... You are so techincal and it seems like you have put a lot of time into this.. I'm scared of the firestorm you probably are close to releasing. ^_^

Na, I have been too busy this last month to do anything PowerShell. I did create this within my first couple weeks of scripting though. Was pretty surprised I pulled it off. It's not all that difficult though, it's just a lot of basic code imo.
http://www.shudnow.net/2008/09/25/obtaining-exchange-information-including-edge-with-powershell/

HeroPsycho

I'm SO glad I picked up what little PowerShell I know at this point. I'm working on a large scale company acquisition, and the absorbing company has been asking for a bunch of information about the side that's being absorbed, and it's fairly large. They wanted a list of all domains and their functional levels (10 domains), list of all domain controllers and what sites they're in (over 100 domain controllers and some 40 sites), counts of users and computers per site/office, mailbox report of all mailboxes with size and what not. I could go on and on.

Between PowerShell, the Quest AD CMDlets, PowerGUI, and the PowerGUI Exchange 2003 PowerPack, I was able to provide reports of all this in a few hours, most of which was spent waiting for PowerGUI to enumerate the 1.5TB public folder store this environment has. PowerShell has been so effective for me here that they are completely baffled how I'm able to do all I'm doing so quickly. I've used it for account editing, group management tasks, reporting, mass configuration changes (ex. adding conditional forwarding to 13 DNS servers for numerous domains), and just other odd problems that I could solve practically with it.

If you're hesitant if PowerShell is something worth learning, trust me, you won't regret learning it.

Claymoore

HeroPsycho wrote:

If you're hesitant if PowerShell is something worth learning, trust me, you won't regret learning it.

I only regret not having enough time to learn it NOW. Just recently I have had a few tasks to complete that would have been easier with Powershell, but I just had to slog through them using old fashioned AD queries and excel exports. Knowing what Powershell is capable of (even though I don't know how to use it just yet) has me looking forward to ditching the collection of various scripts in different scripting languages I have collected over the years. Powershell and Group Policy Preferences are going to make my life as an admin so much easier.

If you really want a list of Powershell books, check out the Tower of Power from the Windows Powershell Blog. Although they are collecting dust on the shelf right now, I have picked up PowerShell Step by Step, PowerShell Scripting Guide, and PowerShell Cookbook. It's not a PowerShell book, but I wanted some help understanding the general command syntax so I also got a copy of Mastering Regular Expressions. Now I just need to find the time to start working through them...

HeroPsycho

That's the thing. I thought the same thing about how it would take too much time to learn how to do something in Powershell.

What I've found is it's ridiculously and surprisingly easy to figure out just what you want to do.

If you just learn a few basic commands and concepts, you can achieve amazing results. 99% of what I've done I've figured out using the following cmdlets and concepts:

get-help
get-member
pipelining
where-object filters

None of those are terribly difficult to learn well enough to get use out of them.

dynamik

What are you guys using for your test environment? Just a Server 2003 or 2008 VM?

royal

dynamik wrote:

What are you guys using for your test environment? Just a Server 2003 or 2008 VM?

I have a Hyper-V Lab at home. Server 2003 DC, Server 2008 DC, CCR Cluster, Etc... Will be building up a second forest soon to do things such as ADMT/QMM. That way I have almost everything I'll need to play with. Server 2008 R2 is adding a ton of stuff for PowerShell including the AD tools built on top of PowerShell and PowerShell being installed by default.

HeroPsycho

dynamik wrote:

What are you guys using for your test environment? Just a Server 2003 or 2008 VM?

Both. I use VMWare Server 2.0.