I saw a tweet this morning that was a PowerShell one-liner for capturing folder permissions to a text file. There’s nothing wrong with it but it’s hard to be truly productive in 140 characters so I thought I would take the idea and run with it a little bit. Here are some ways you might…
Category: Best Practices
Scripting Games 2011 Notes from the Field
I’ve been making headway in reviewing and judging entries in the 2011 Scripting Games. I know there has been a lot of discussion about the lack of comments and I’m doing what I can with entries I judge, but I’m not guaranteeing anything. What I will do is put down some overall comments and impressions…
PowerShell Is Not Omnipotent
Last week I was working on a problem in a PowerShell forum. The admin was having problems getting Add-Computer to work. After a bit of “try this/try that” something became clear, and it’s something that is easy to overlook. Especially when we get lulled into thinking PowerShell is omnipotent.
My TrainSignal Interview
During TechEd in New Orleans this year, I had an opportunity to sit down with some great people from TrainSignal. We had a great chat on PowerShell, why it matters and why you should take the time to learn it. I hope you’ll take a few minutes and watch the video.
TechEd 2010 Demos
As promised, I’ve assembled my demo scripts as well as the transcriptfrom my TechEd 2010 talk Paradigm Shift Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition to Windows PowerShell. The official slide deck is supposed to be available on the TechEd web site. I’m going to post an expanded version of the deck here sometime next week. In…
Content Redirection
Here’s another item I see in some submisstions of the 2010 Scripting Games that I felt I should address: the use of legacy console redirection. While technically not illegal or wrong, an example like this demonstrates (at least in my opinion) that the scripter hasn’t fully adopted the PowerShell paradigm. $computers=get-content "computers.txt" $data=foreach ($computer in…
Bool vs Switch
I have to say I’m generally impressed with the quality of submissions to this year’s Scripting Games. But there is a recurring concept that some people are using and I think there’s a better way. Some contestants are defining function or script parameters as booleans. But I believe they really should be using the [switch]…
PowerShell in the Enterprise
A new whitepaper I wrote for Quest Software has finally made it’s public appearance: PowerShell in the Enterprise: Best Practices and Recommendations. The paper discusses some best practices for using PowerShell in an enterprise environment. Essentially, getting the most from your PowerShell “investment”, especially when you might have multiple PowerShell-based administrators. Although certainly the suggestions…