I need YOUR PowerShell Stories

We all love PowerShell and we all probably have some very entertaining stories about a situation where it really saved our butts (or caused problems). Either way, we can all tell some kind of interesting story around a memorable moment you had with PowerShell or automation in general.  I’d love to hear about them.

I’m looking for a short story anywhere from a few paragraphs to an entire article if you want.  The more detail the better. What kind of situation were you in? Were you under a deadline and PowerShell saved the day?  Did automation backfire in your face and you blew up your whole datacenter?  I want to know about it!

PowerShell.org, Inc. 2015 Shareholder Meeting Roundup

I wanted to provide a quick wrap-up of the Annual Shareholder Meeting that we just concluded. We had a quorum of shareholder votes present online or by proxy, and we made some important decisions that I want to share with the community overall.

One, we voted to amend the organization’s Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws to make some important structural changes. These are absolutely in line with our original intent for the organization, and reflect how we’ve actually done things, but now they’re “law.” The first was to remove any legal possibility of corporate funds being paid out to shareholders; all corporate funds must be used only for corporate programs and operating expenses. We also voted that, in the event the corporation is completely dissolved, any remaining assets and proceeds will be donated to a 501(c)(3) charity.

The Scripting Games: Here's What's Happening

I know a lot of folks have been wondering about when the next Scripting Games will be. It’s a complicated answer… so bear with me for a minute while I unburden my soul to you. If you prefer to just skip the explanations, you can skip a bit to see what we’re doing, part 1.

The Background

I’m not sure how long Microsoft’s Scripting Guys ran The Scripting Games, but it goes back at least to 2006. Back then, the focus was on VBScript, it wasn’t until a year or so later that a parallel PowerShell track was started, and another year or two before VBScript was discontinued. The Games back then were… well, games. They weren’t always terribly real-world, but they were fun, and they made you think.

Decorating PowerShell Objects

Ever wonder how PowerShell seems to know how to format objects? When you run

Get-ChildItem or

Get-WmiObject , you only see a few key properties, but a wealth of other information is available through commands like

Select-Object and

Get-Member .

Have you ever written a PowerShell function that you nearly always pipe to

Format-Table ? Wouldn’t it be nice to specify some default properties and force them into a table?

Stop by for a quick hit on how to decorate your PowerShell objects with type names and formatting, including a re-usable tool to abstract out some of the details.

Walkthrough: An example of how I write PowerShell functions

A couple of days ago I posted a blog article titled “PowerShell function: Test-ConsoleColor provides a visual demonstration of the foreach scripting construct” and today I thought I would walk you through that function step by step since it’s what I consider to be a well written PowerShell function.

It starts out by using the #Requires statement to require at least PowerShell version 3 or it won’t run. It also requires that the PowerShell Community Extensions module be installed since it uses a function from that module and continuing without it only leads to errors:

Philadelphia PowerShell User Group Meeting – July 7th 2015

Join us Tuesday, July 7th when PhillyPosh members John Mello and TJ Turner will be presenting. John will be giving a presentation on the new ConvertFrom-String cmdlet in the PowerShell V5 preview. Afterwards TJ Turner will be giving a presentation entitled “What’s in your toolbox?”.

Please  register  if you plan to attend in person or online. The meeting URL to join us remotely will be included in your Eventbrite registration confirmation.

Why Remoting vs. SSH Isn't Even a Thing

As you’ve probably read, Microsoft recently announced that they’re getting on board with SSH, and that they’ve plans to, in some future-and-unspecified version of Windows, include a default SSH server and client. Some folks have taken to the Twittersphere rejoicing this decision, even though I suspect they’ve no idea why Microsoft is doing it. Others have suggested that this is the downfall of Remoting (management via WS-MAN), because who would want that when you’ve got SSH?

Trust, but Verify

The PowerShell code you write can turn up in interesting places. Production services might rely on it. Your co-workers might take a peak and borrow ideas from it. You might decide to share it online. Someone might see your code online and use it in their own solutions.

Hit the link for a quick bit on how we can help create more reliable, consistent, and secure solutions. Simplified to one line: always ask yourself “what could go wrong?”

PowerShell.org: Where We've Been, Our New Look, Where We're Going

PowerShell.org has come a long way, both spiritually and physically, since our inception in September of 2012. Let’s look at some screen grabs from the Internet Archive, and take a stroll through our history.

Mississippi PowerShell User Group Virtual Meeting – June 9th 2015

Join us virtually on Tuesday, June 9th at 8:30pm Central Time when PowerShell MVP Trevor Sullivan will present “Creating Object-Oriented Scripts using PowerShell Classes” .

During this deep, technical discussion, we will take a look at PowerShell classes, and then authoring PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) Resource using PowerShell v5 classes. We’ll also explore leveraging PowerShell DSC on Microsoft Azure infrastructure (IaaS) virtual machines using the Azure VM DSC Extension. This session assumes some previous knowledge of PowerShell & DSC, so make sure you’re familiar with the basics ahead of time!