TechEd: PowerShell for Beginners

Tobias — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 01:41:00 GMT

Microsoft is so clever: they scheduled the first dedicated PowerShell session right at 9:00 am sharp so all of us had to get up early. This session was for PowerShell beginners, and the conference room was crammed. A lot of the attendees had never used PowerShell before, and some had Unix roots. Interest in PowerShell is definitely rising. While three years ago, Exchange 2007 triggered the first wave of PowerShell excitement, today it is the general availability in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 as well as the dramatic increase in products supporting PowerShell that fuels the second and even more powerful wave.

PowerShell: Important Skill

With PowerShell "on by default" on all Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 boxes, and readily available as optional download down to Windows XP, learning and mastering PowerShell becomes an important career decision. Jeffrey pointed out that PowerShell will be a basic skill for productive Windows admins, and without it, you'll be eventually well behind the curve. That is no threat, though, rather a great challenge and chance. Learning new stuff can be a lot of fun, and Jeffrey and Lee demoed a lot of basic concepts and how intuitively the PowerShell cmdlet vocabulary can be used to tell your computer what to do. Having this skill will make you feel a lot better, believe me! It just enables you to do and achieve so much more with so much less effort.

Community is Essential

While in school, copying stuff from your neighbor was called cheating, later in life this is called collaboration, and it is a good thing. That's why Jeffrey talked about all the great and free resources to ask questions, share ideas and get PowerShell guidance fast. One is our powershell.com "Ask the Expert" forum where five MVPs monitor their respective areas of expertise and provide answers, guidance and help around the clock. Hey, we are there for you! Try us! It is absolutely free.

Demos, Tips, Fun!

The remainder of the session, Jeffrey and Lee demoed various aspects of PowerShell and talked a little bit about the concepts behind PowerShell like arrays, objects and the pipeline processor. BTW, if you're hungry for more, there are more than 270 books out, and you can always visit our free online library. We had a lot of fun, and as always with Jeffreys presentations, I again learned one thing or two.

ISE tip: while inside ISE, try pressing F1. This brings up the built-in help file, and you can browse and snoop around and get nicely formatted help for all standard cmdlets. This even works context sensitive: click on Get-Process, for example, then F1, and you get help for that cmdlet.
PowerShell tip: ever wondered what a process is used for? Try piping it to good old dir! Have a look (this was a German system):

PS> get-process wtgu | dir

Verzeichnis: C:\Program Files (x86)\T-Mobile\web'n'walk Manager

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
----                -------------     ------ ----
-a---        19.06.2008     12:42     857544 WTGU.exe

Hungry for more?

At the end of this session, Thomas (rocking the house, see pic below), Alex and I were approached by a lot of attendees with questions about this and that. We were more than happy to answer them.

I'd like to point out though that visiting our Ask the Experts area is open to everyone. Posting questions there helps others with similar problems, too. While you are at it, you may want to try and download the latest version of PowerShell Plus, Ideras advanced PowerShell development environment. You can get it here.

And if you happen to be located anywhere in Europe and want a great PowerShell Inhouse training, contact me at tobias.weltner@scriptinternals.de. I do these trainings regularly, passionately and with tons of real-world-examples not found anywhere else.

Bye for now,
Tobias
PowerShell MVP

Dreaming in PowerShell : beginners

TechEd: PowerShell for Beginners

PowerShell: Important Skill

Community is Essential

Demos, Tips, Fun!

Hungry for more?