Codemash: Powershell: Ten things you need to know

Presented by Matthew Hester and Aaron Lerch.  It’s interesting because much of the audience really hasn’t seemed to have even touched Powershell.

• What is it?
• Rich script environment
• Bulk operations
• Interactive environment
• The Active Directory Administrative Center that ships with Windows 2008 R2 is all Powershell driven.
• When to use it
• consistent, repeatable tasks
• talking with Active Directory, registry, WMI and others natively
• to create aliases to create commands that you’re used to.
• Make use of commandlet (a verb-noun syntax) and the parameters (the name-argument pair).
• Making use of the pipeline
• Talked about the Powershell ISE that comes with version 2.
• Useful commands:
• get-module –listavailable
• help “command” –examples/-detailed/-full
• Providers
• Get-PSProvider
• Custom
• DriveCmdletProvider
• ItemCmdletProvider
• ContainterCmdletProvider
• The ShouldProcess capability means it handles the –whatif flag
• Use PSCmdlet when creating your customizing commandlets.
• System.Management.Automation is the assembly to reference
• PSHost for hosting the powershell run space.
• The Windows Troubleshooting Pack is built on Powershell.

 

On a side note, this was after lunch, where Hank Janssen gave a keynote on PHP and Microsoft.  Pretty interesting stuff.  It’s great to hear about the efforts that Microsoft does with the open source projects that are out there.  Although he didn’t really plan on some of his demos being that horrible with the crowd killing the internet connection.