For a good view of what’s new in 2 check out Joel “jaykul” Bennett’s excellent slide deck here

To add to the mammoth PowerShell support included in Windows 7, the Windows 7 Resource Kit also includes a PowerShell Pack which adds 10 modules to help supercharge your Windows PowerShell scripting:

WPK - Create rich user interfaces quick and easily from Windows PowerShell. Think HTA, but easy. Over 600 scripts to help you build quick user interfaces
TaskScheduler - List scheduled tasks, create or delete tasks
FileSystem - Monitor files and folders, check for duplicate files, and check disk space
IsePack – Supercharge your scripting in the Integrated Scripting Environment with over 35 shortcuts
DotNet – Explore loaded types, find commands that can work with a type, and explore how you can use PowerShell, DotNet and COM together
PSImageTools - Convert, rotate, scale, and crop images and get image metadata
PSRSS – Harness the FeedStore from PowerShell
PSSystemTools – Get Operating System or Hardware Information
PSUserTools – Get the users on a system, check for elevation, and start-processaadministrator
PSCodeGen -Generates PowerShell scripts, C# code, and P/Invoke

This is all well and good, but what about the other Microsoft Operating Systems? Well, now Microsoft have released the Windows Management Framework, which includes PowerShell 2.0, WinRM 2.0 and BITS 4.0 providing the same rich experience of PowerShell 2.0 for Vista, Server 2003 & 2008 and Windows XP.

Looks to me like Microsoft just super-sized my PowerShell options :-)

If you’re interested in PowerShell then you have probably already seen the news over at the Microsoft PowerShell Team Blog, but just in case I’ve linked to the three recent posts that I think are pretty much just awesome. Go take a look, you can bet I will be ;-)

Jonathan and Hal (from the PowerScripting Podcast) will be hosting Jeffrey Snover for a Virtual PowerShell V2 Launch Party on Thursday, which is of course GA* day for Windows 7!!

Lee Holmes from the PowerShell Team has also announced that one of their internal tools has been released as a Codeplex Project.

The Cmdlet Designer makes it much easier for teams to concentrate on the design, naming, and consistency of their cmdlets, while also guaranteeing name registration and collision avoidance across Microsoft.

To sweeten the deal, it offers:

* Integrated help authoring
* Efficient bulk operations (parameter and cmdlet cloning)
* Generation of cmdlet code
* Full scripting support
* Automatic code-spec comparison and testing
* Role-based security, history logging, and more.

But wait, there’s more! It’s now available under MS-PL from http://www.codeplex.com/CmdletDesigner

And last, but in no means least, with the recent announcement of the Windows 7 Resource Kit book comes the availablity of the Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack. There’s a detailed breakdown of the features in the PowerShell Team’s blog post, but in a brief look it contains: 10 modules with 600+ scripts. Great work James!

* General Availablity.

Since returning home I’ve really missed the community and interest around PowerShell. After talking to some of the Microsoft cool cats on the east coast, I’ve organised to commence the PSUGAU.

The idea is to give the group a national focus rather than just solely Perth IT geeks. We hope to achieve this by utilising Live Meeting to give anyone interested the opportunity to join us online. This will also allow me to invite PowerShell guest presenters to help mix things up and bring in some great experience from the wider community.

I’m still in the process of working out where we can host the user group, and I’m trying to get the website operational (watch this space), but the intention is to have the inaugural meeting around the end of September.

If you’re interested in coming along and getting involved then ping me an email so I know how much pizza to order! There’s also a poll on the front page to get an indication on your meeting preferences.

A couple of years later, and PowerShell has become way more pervasive and is going to continue to get more and more penetration into our daily IT infrastructure – Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are excellent examples of how this is going to accelerate PowerShell’s visibility and wider use.

I’m thinking that the PowerShell Toolbox page is in desperate need of an update. So, over the next week or so I’ll go through and give it a spring clean and add new popular tools to it.

If you’re intersted, feel free to drop a comment here listing your favourites, and I’ll make sure they get added to the page.

OK, so anyone who is remotely a fan already knows that Blink-182 are back together – especially in the US as their Tour is imminent!

I must admit to being a bit of a Blink-182 Fanboi, so I was really stoked to hear when they reunited!

I’m waiting for the new album, and for them to come Down Under at some point!

In the mean time however, I have updated to my Blink-182 themed TweetDeck – sweet :)

Interestingly, I read Scott Hanselman’s post a few weeks ago, and figured I’d give it another go. I’ve been using it for almost a month now, and I’m finding that I’m not alone when I say that after a second look, I finally see the value in it.

I think the problem is that it’s explained as a micro-blog, and so it spawns imagery of “I’m at the Belgian for a beer if you want to join me.” kind of posts. This is one side of Twitter, but I believe the real value comes from applying Rule 2 from Scott’s post: Search.

All of a sudden, the focus shifts, and it’s no longer about only seeing tweets from the people you follow. Now you’re part of a larger conversation, and this is where hashtags come in. By searching on hashtags that you’re interested in you can take part of a geographically disconnected conversation in real time about whatever it is that interests you.

For example, I currently have searches in my TweetDeck on:

#PowerShell
#Ashes
#Win7
“#MDT 2010″ OR “SCCM 2007″

Popular hashtags can be seen here.

I’ve been on Facebook for a while now, and whereas I love seeing the updates from friends, and what everyone is up to, I really have no time for all the other gaming and features that seem to fill up my profile. To me, Twitter is the useful status feature of Facebook, but in a real time.

So, thanks to Scott for his post, and if you find yourself on Twitter feel free to add me: http://www.twitter.com/leadfollowmove

$scores = Import-Csv .\scores.csv
$scores | Sort-Object -Property Score -Descending

sort-object

$scores | Get-Member

sort-object example 2

$scores | Sort-Object -Property {[int] $_.Score} -Descending

sort-object example 3

My issue has been that traditionally, Microsoft Tools were great at performing whatever the task was against a single machine, but didn’t usually scale to performing the same task against, say 1,000 machines. That has been were commandline usually picks up the slack.

My passion for PowerShell isn’t exactly secret, but I’m also lazy. If I need to do one task on one machine I’m happy to click around and use the UI. If I’m trying to build out an environment, then I’ll move to commandline.

What do you prefer? Cast your vote in the Poll on the Polls page or on the right of the front page.

Microsoft Assessment and Panning Toolkit 4.0

According to the MAP Team Blog, MAP 4.0 moved out of Beta yesterday :)

Download MAP 4.0

What’s New with v4.0?
Version 4.0 of this toolkit has the following new features:
• Windows 7 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Virtualization Candidates Assessment for Hyper-V R2 Server Consolidation
• Integration with the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Calculator
• Inventory of VMware Server Hosts and Guests
• User Interface and Proposal Customization for Partner co-branding
• Enhanced Usability and Improved Inventory Performance

Additional Features
• Virtualization Candidates Assessment for Hyper-V Server Consolidation
• Windows Vista Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Windows Server 2008 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• 2007 Microsoft Office Readiness Assessment
• SQL Server Instance Discovery
• Desktop Security Assessment for Anti-virus and Anti-malware Programs Installation
• Forefront Client Security/NAP Readiness Assessment
• App-V Infrastructure Readiness Assessment
• Power Savings “Green IT” Calculator

More infromation on this excellent tool is available on TechNet.

My inplace upgrade from Beta 1 “apeared” to be successful. However when I went to update the deployment share, I received the following error:

Update Deployment Share - Failed

This appears to be caused by a directory structure change in the WAIK between Beta and RC. Uninstalling WAIK, and resinstalling with the RC version will resolve this, but which version is the RC version? The WAIK RC is available from here as per Michael’s recent post

I have two ISO’s that I’ve downloaded recently from Microsoft:

en_windows_automated_installation_kit_x86_x64_ia64_dvd_349519.iso
KB3AIK_EN.iso

So according to the filename on the link on Michael’s blog I should be using KB3AIK_EN.iso. Except that this is the one that I did install when I built the server for MDT Beta 1.

Looking at the readme.htm in both ISO’s provides no clue either as neither are clearly marked as Beta or RC. Using Orca from the MSI SDK 4.5 I took a look at the ProductVersion and ProductName from the Property Table in the wAIKAMD64.msi. The values were the same for both:

ProductVersion = 2.0.0.0
ProductName = Windows Automated Installation Kit

In the end the only way I able to differenciate them was by the PackageCode in the Summary Information Stream:

Beta = {7FB35EC9-03A9-49AF-B0A1-81BDBA3949F5}
RC = {3BD5A1BF-F520-4BAA-9C7E-FAA12EF37AAF}

Restarting the MDT 2010 Beta 2 Workbench after the correct version of WAIK is installed, caused the following prompt:

Follow the steps as described to resolve the issue.

I don’t know how the filenames got reversed because I’m pretty sure I didn’t rename either of the WAIK ISO’s, but it provided for an entertaining half hour!