I’ve never been to Seattle, and I have to thank Aaron Nelson and Jason Helmick for being my de-facto tour guides Sunday afternoon. Walking around downtown and getting a taste of the stereotypical Seattle weather was a great start to the week, and after that first day the sun decided to come out, which seemed to be a bigger deal for the locals than someone from Florida. Sunday evening there was a community mixer that immediately clarified how different this was going to be than a typical IT conference. At any other venue, I don’t get to chat with Jeffrey Snover about DevOps, or talk to Don Jones about PowerShell content for desktop administration. This was truly a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) experience for non-MVPs.

Don Jones

I like to think I know a thing or two about PowerShell. I read about it, I write about it, I use it every day at work, but after the first session it became clear how much I don’t know. There weren’t just PowerShell gurus attending, there were C# MVPs, SQL MVPs, and senior software engineers that designed the programs I use every day. It’s quite humbling to go from being “The PowerShell Guy” at work to a conference where it feels like everyone knows more about PowerShell than me.

The summit was held at the Microsoft campus, which is a neat experience itself, but you have to hand it to them for providing such outstanding support for this event. The conference rooms, the food, the power strips everywhere for laptops was a notch above what you’d see at a typical conference. There’s no requirement for the PowerShell Team to put together a hands-on workshop, but they put in the effort, and that level of community involvement pays off. Conferences like TechEd don’t allow me to pull aside someone like Kenneth Hansen and discuss the areas where I think the PowerShell team should focus on. This kind of experience is invaluable.

Alan Renouf

While many of the attendees are well-known authors and developers in the PowerShell world, there are a ton of people that are just writing some very cool PowerShell code. The entire week I saw people cracking open laptops to show someone else what they were working on. It’s astounding to watch a conversion at the coffee station transform into a group crowding around a laptop to see how someone solved a problem at their company.

Jason Shirk

The PowerShell Summit North America 2013 was a great use of my time, and my cup runneth over with ideas for using what I’ve learned in my own organization. It was great to see old friends again, and meet a bunch of new ones. Thank you to PowerShell.org, the event sponsors, and everyone that put in long hours making things run so smoothly. This was an event to remember, and I’ll definitely be back next year.

SQLSaturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. This event will be held Sep 29 2012 at Seminole State College, Main Campus, 100 Weldon Boulevard Bld, University Partnership Building, Sanford, FL 32773. Admittance to this event is free, but we do charge a lunch fee of 10.00 so that we can provide a lunch – not pizza! Please register soon as seating is limited, and let friends and colleages know about the event.

An Introduction to PowerShell Remoting: Part One

An Introduction to PowerShell Remoting Part Two: Configuring PowerShell Remoting

An Introduction to PowerShell Remoting Part Three: Interactive and Fan-Out Remoting

An Introduction to PowerShell Remoting Part Four: Sessions and Implicit Remoting

An Introduction to PowerShell Remoting Part Five: Constrained PowerShell Endpoints

I’ve uploaded the transcript from my PowerShell for Beginners session, and the slide deck from my Introduction to PowerShell Remoting session.

If you want to learn more about PowerShell, a great place to start is the Hey, Scripting Guy! blog from Microsoft’s scripting guy Ed Wilson. If it can be done with PowerShell, Ed has probably written about it. I also have a list of free PowerShell eBooks available, along with a list of paid books on various PowerShell topics. I also listed several resources in my post on the Jacksonville SQL Saturday.

Thanks for coming out on Saturday, and I hope to see you again at a future event!

If you liked what you saw and want to learn more, there are many resources available for learning PowerShell. I have a list of free PowerShell eBooks which is a good place to start. I also have a list of paid PowerShell books. For someone completely new to PowerShell or someone that prefers a very structured learning approach, I suggest Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches by Don Jones. Be sure to check out the additional resources at the book’s website, and take advantage of the companion videos Don has made available on YouTube. Someone with a scripting or programming background that’s looking for a solid reference book would do well with Bruce Payette’s book PowerShell in Action. This is a very detailed look at how PowerShell works and why certain decisions were made when designing the language.

Many PowerShell videos are available at Channel 9, including the PowerShell sessions from TechEd events. Don Jones has a four hour sample of a training class uploaded to Youtube, and Jeff Hicks has a series of videos from TrainSignal.

Have a long commute and need something to listen to? Try downloading some podcasts from the PowerScripting Podcast. Last week Michiel Wories, the Principal Architect and Lead Developer of SQL Server, was talking about SQL Server 2012.

Most of these resources focus on PowerShell in general and don’t get specific on SQL Server. For some examples on how PowerShell is used by SQL Server experts, I suggest reading the blogs from Allen White, Aaron Nelson, Chad Miller, and Max Trinidad.

For some more ideas on how PowerShell can be useful for a Database Administrtor, check out the SQL Server PowerShell Extensions. SQLPSX is an open source project for working with ADO.NET, SMO, Agent, RMO, SSIS, SQL script files, PBM, Oracle and MySQL and using Powershell ISE as a SQL and Oracle query tool.

There is a massive amount of information available, but hopefully this is enough to get you started. The PowerShell community is very active and close-knit in the way the SQL community is. Send someone an email, ask a question in a forum, or throw the twitter tag #PowerShell on your tweets, and you’re very likely to get pointed in the right direction.

In a more recent situation, I was handed a spreadsheet of computers with printer shares that needed to be removed for security reasons. After getting the list of computer names from the spreadsheet into PowerShell, I had to figure out how to remove the printer shares. I very often turn to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) in situations like this because I’m familiar with what it can do from my vbscript days where WMI was very often the only way to get anything done. PowerShell makes working with WMI much easier than it ever was with vbscript.

Get-WmiObject -ComputerName Computer01 -Class Win32_Printer | foreach {$_.Shared = $False; $_.Put()}

The documentation for the Win32_Printer class says the shared property is Read/write, so it can be modified. The put method is used to update the printer object. So in this example, all the printers on Computer01 are retrieved, the Shared property on each printer is set to false, and the put method is called to save the change.

Invoke-Command -ComputerName $Computers -ScriptBlock {Get-WmiObject Win32_Printer | foreach {$_.Shared = $False; $_.Put()}}

This can be done very quickly with PowerShell remoting enabled, in which case the Invoke-Command cmdlet is used. The difference here is that instead of specifying a single computer name, the $Computers variable contains a list of computer names. This allows the scriptblock to be sent to all the computers in parallel.

Get-WmiObject Win32_Printer -ComputerName Computer01 | Set-WmiInstance -Arguments @{Shared=$False}

Invoke-Command -ComputerName $Computers -ScriptBlock {Get-WmiObject Win32_Printer | Set-WmiInstance -Arguments @{Shared=$False}}

Another method is to use the Set-WmiInstance cmdlet to set properties on the printer objects.

Introduction to PowerShell Remoting

Slide deck for Introduction to PowerShell Remoting

Layman’s Guide to PowerShell 2.0 Remoting
Ravikanth Chaganti

Administrator’s Guide to Windows PowerShell Remoting
Dr. Tobias Weltner
Aleksandar Nikolic
Richard Giles

Windows PowerShell in Action, Second Edition
Bruce Payette

$Computers = "Computer01","Computer02","Computer03"
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem -ComputerName $Computers

The simplest way is to manually type names of computers to generate an array of text strings in a variable. That variable can then be passed to cmdlets that accept an array of strings for the input of a ComputerName variable.

$Computers | Out-File computers.txt

If this same list of names might be useful in the future, one way to save the list permanently is to save it to a text file.

$Computers = Get-Content computers.txt

When the list is needed again, the contents of the file can be read and stored to a variable.

# Load the Microsoft Active Directory Module
Import-Module ActiveDirectory

# Get a list of computers that have WIN7 in their name
$Computers = Get-ADComputer -Filter "Name -like '*WIN7*'" | ForEach-Object {$_.Name}

# Get a list of all computer names
$Computers = Get-ADComputer -Filter * | ForEach-Object {$_.Name}

# Get a list of fully qualified host names
$Computers = Get-ADComputer -Filter * | ForEach-Object {$_.DNSHostName}

When there’s more than a few computers to deal with, it’s much easier to get those names from the computer accounts in Active Directory. In a correctly configured domain environment, the Microsoft Active Directory cmdlets can be used to generate lists of computers.

# Load the Quest Active Directory cmdlets
Add-PSSnapin Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement

# Get a list of computers running the Windows Server 2008 operating system
$Computers = Get-QADComputer -OSName "Windows Server 2008*" | ForEach-Object {$_.Name}

# Get a list of computers that are members of the Database Servers group
$Computers = Get-QADComputer -MemberOf 'Database Servers' | ForEach-Object {$_.Name}

# Get a list of computers that are located in the Domain Controllers OU
$Computers = Get-QADComputer -SearchRoot "testlab.local/Domain Controllers" | ForEach-Object {$_.Name}

Not everyone has the infrastructure in place to use the Microsoft cmdlets. Fortunately, Quest has freely available cmdlets for interacting with Active Directory.

Get-ADComputer -Filter * | Export-Csv computerList.csv -NoTypeInformation
Get-QADComputer | Export-Csv computerList.csv -NoTypeInformation

Sometimes it’s difficult to filter a list of names using these cmdlets. Another option is to export all the computer account properties to a Comma Separated Values file, and then use Excel to filter the list.

$Computers = Import-Csv -Path computerList.csv | ForEach-Object {$_.Name}

When the spreadsheet has been narrowed down to the required names, it can then be imported back into PowerShell to get the array of computer names.

The capability of PowerShell to import Csv files is also useful when a list of computers is provided in an Excel spreadsheet from another IT department. It’s common for reporting software to generate spreadsheets of computer names along with all kinds of other data. By saving these Excel spreadsheets as Csv files, they can easily be imported directly into PowerShell.

$Computers = Import-Csv -Path Computers.csv | Foreach-Object {$_.NetBIOSName.Trim()}

Sometimes spreadsheets generated by reporting software will include spaces around the cell data. If computer names have spaces around them, cmdlets like Invoke-Command will not accept those names as input. One way to clean up the computer names is to use string methods like Trim.

$Computers = 1..254 | ForEach-Object {"192.168.1.$_"}

In certain situations, IP addresses can be used instead of computer names. This is helpful when actions need to be run on all computers on a subnet, regardless of their names.

Just like anything in PowerShell, there are lots of different ways to accomplish a task. These are just a few ways to generate a list of computers, which can then be used with any number of scripts and functions.