Thursday, December 27, 2007

Windows PowerShell Virtual User Group #2 meeting video--ONLINE!

As in my first meeting, the process to edit the WMV created by Live Meeting 2007 requires a few steps.

Finally, my videos from my 2nd meeting detailed HERE are online.

Here's the resulting files, which I've split up by presenter (each is roughly 15-25MB).

  • Marco Shaw's introduction

I introduce myself, the user group.  I talk about the agenda, thank Microsoft and PowerGadgets for sponsoring this meeting, do some quick polls, then introduce each speaker. 

Don started off after my introduction and talked about the new PowerShell Community site, Sapien's 2nd edition of PowerShell: TFM, and Sapien's PowerShell training.

Dmitry was going to talk about Quest's Active Directory cmdlets and PowerGUI.  Dmitry had technical problems and was not able to complete his talk.  I'm hoping he will want to redo his presentation at a later time.

Oisin did a presentation on advanced development he's working on with the PowerShell Community Extensions and talked about his other project on Codeplex called PSEventing.  The first 2 links are for PSCX development, and the 3rd is for PSEventing only.

 

Jeffrey from the Microsoft PowerShell development team talked about the new PowerShell 2.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP).

 

I'll announce the tentative details for meeting #3 next week.  It is tentatively planned for January 16, 2008 at 8PM EST (New York time).

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Guest blog post on PowerGadgets.com

I posted a guest blog entry HERE yesterday on the PowerGadgets blog section.

"Something that has come up quite a bit is people asking how they can possibly hide sensitive information in their PowerGadgets files.  When you use the PowerGadgets Creator, your gadget is saved in a .pgf file extension which is basically XML formatted data..."

Basically, I pull together two of my other posts HERE and HERE to demonstrate how people using PowerGadgets can somewhat hide sensitive data from what are usually plain XML formatted text files.  This is definitely useful when one wants to distribute files to other PowerGadgets users, but wants to keep the details of the PowerShell commands run a secret.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

TechMentor San Fransicso speaker

I will be doing 2 talks at TechMentor in San Francisco on Monday, March 31, 2008:

#1: Building a GUI in Windows PowerShell

In this session, MVP Marco Shaw will guide you through using Windows Forms from the .NET Framework to build lightweight, fully functional graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that run within Windows PowerShell scripts.  You will be guided through the Windows Forms hierarchy and be shown practical and effective examples for creating, fine-tuning and using your using your own customized GUIs directly from within Windows PowerShell. This is an intermediate session: You should have a basic understanding of PowerShell scripting in order to take full advantage of this session.

#2: Managing Remote Systems the Windows PowerShell V2 Way

In this session, MVP Marco Shaw will discuss the new remoting features that will be available in the next version of Windows PowerShell currently being offered as a Community Technology Preview (CTP). This session will focus on the usage of: the new functionality that comes with the Invoke-Expression cmdlet and the usage of the new *-PSJob and *-Runspace cmdlets. The concepts of "fan-in", "fan-out" and interactive remoting will also be discussed. This is an intermediate session: You should have a basic understanding of PowerShell scripting in order to take full advantage of this session.

(Above is directory quoted from the TechMentor site.)

Drop me a comment if you'll be there or are from the San Fransicso area.

Fellow MVP Brandon Shell and also Microsoft's Bruce Payette will be doing sessions also.

Windows PowerShell™ v1.0: TFM® 2nd Edition

I reported back in June HERE that I was reviewing a book for Sapien.  Well, the NDA is over and the book an my involvement is announced HERE.  The book is the 2nd edition of Sapien Press' PowerShell: TFM book.

I reviewed about 150 pages of the book on the more advanced concepts, and I think the content overall is great.  This 2nd edition have many improvements over the 1st edition.

Don and Jeffery also already have a early release version of a 3rd edition covering the PowerShell 2.0 CTP!

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Windows PowerShell Virtual User Group Meeting #2--update

Last week, I held my second virtual user group meeting announced HERE.  Overall, things went relatively well. 

Don Jones (MVP) started off after my introduction and talked about the new PowerShell Community site, Sapien's 2nd edition of PowerShell: TFM, and Sapien's PowerShell training.

Next was Dmitry Sotnikov (MVP) who was going to talk about Quest's Active Directory cmdlets and PowerGUI.  Dmitry had technical problems and was not able to complete his talk.  I'm hoping he will want to redo his presentation at a later time.

After Dmitry, Oisin Grehan did a presentation on advanced development he's working on with the PowerShell Community Extensions and talked about his other project on Codeplex called PSEventing.

Last up was Jeffrey Snover from the Microsoft PowerShell development team.  Jeffrey talked about the new PowerShell 2.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP).

Near the end, I made the mistake again of leaving myself on mute.  I talked away for at least 5 minutes while on mute to finish the meeting.  Maybe I'll get this right by meeting #3.

I've got the entire session recorded as a raw 10MB file.  I'll need to edit it and re-encode it, etc. before it is somewhat presentable.

I'll post an update when it is ready for viewing.

I've started planning meeting #3 for the mid-January timeframe.  Details to be announced in the next week or so with the list of tentative speakers.