Here’s a list of many of the PowerShell MVPs and their blogs.  My list is not comprehensive but this one is.  Unfortunately, the Microsoft page doesn’t necessarily have the blogs unless the MVP happened to put that in their profile, and even then it’s a bit of clicking to find that out, so I thought I’d make this quick list.  Let’s call this list “beta”.  Eventually I’d like to have it on a wiki or other easily editable page and include other data like links to Twitter, and LinkedIn profile pages and so forth.

• /\/\o\/\/ – ThePowerShellGuy
• Brandon Shell on PoSH
• Charlie Russel - x(perts)64
• Daisuke Mutaguchi -Scripting Weblog (Japanese)
• Dmitry Sotnikov - PowerShell and beyond
• Don Jones - Concentrated Technology
• Doug Finke - Development in a Blink
• Gu Huajun - (Chinese)
• Guy Thomas
• Hal Rottenberg - TechProsaic
• Hiroki Takahashi - HIRO’s.NET (Japanese)
• Hiroshi Yoshioka - PowerShell Memo (Japanese)
• Jeffrey Hicks - Scripting Blog and More
• Karl Prosser - Live PowerShell
• Keith Hill’s Blog
• Kirk Munro - Poshoholic
• Marco Shaw - Get-PowershellBlog
• Max Trinidad - Florida PowerShell User Group
• Oisin Grehan - Nivot Ink
• Richard Siddaway’s Weblog
• Shay Levy - $cript Fanatic
• Sherif Talaat - The Arabian PowerShell (Arabic)
• Tobias Weltner - Dreaming in PowerShell
• Vadims Podans’s blog (Russian)
• Vasily Gusev - (Russian)
• Vinicius Canto - (Portuguese)
• Ying Li - PowerShell & System Center
• Arnaud Petitjean (French)

Please leave comments for updates to the list.

Update: I just added a ton of new links and changed some old ones.  It figures that Shay already had a list with everyone in it. 

I was working on my PowerShell profile today and I figured I would share it.  But let’s not stop there.  Why don’t you post yours as well, to your blog or this pastebin (add your link in the comments of this post), and we can learn from each other?

I’ll go first: http://posh.jaykul.com/p/2014

In case you are wondering why I am not using PoshCode.org, the reason is someone’s profile is not general purpose necessarily, and I think it might clutter the repository with stuff that does not make sense except for in the context of this blog post.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, and I wanted to apologize and let you all know what’s going on with me lately.  Lots of stuff has been going on actually, which is good and bad.  I like being busy, so that’s a good thing, but you know sometimes you just try to do too much stuff and then the stress kicks in and that’s not fun.

Anyway, here’s the rundown:

TechMentor

I’m presenting three sessions at TechMentor Orlando, and I’m excited about it.  I hope some of you happen to come down to the show this June, it should be a lot of fun.  I’ve been spending a lot of time getting my sessions ready and I hope that all goes well.  Here are the session names:

• W15 VMware ESXi for the Small Business and Smart IT Pro 
• W19 Automating VMware Management with Windows PowerShell
• TH8 Automate Hyper-V with PowerShell and Virtual Machine Manager

TechEd

You may know that as Director of PowerShellCommunity.org, I was sent to TechEd lsat week in Los Angeles. Steve Murawski and I spent our time alternating between staffing Microsoft’s management technologies booth, attending breakout sessions (and occasionally participating in them), meeting with PoshComm sponsors, meeting with prospective sponsors on the show floor, and just networking with other cool geeks who like PowerShell. If you use Facebook, check out the photos I tagged and captioned that Ibrahim (from the PowerShell team) took while at the show.

And there’s more! I was busy at the show…

I interviewed the one and only Mark Minasi for TechEd Online.  I don’t think it’s  been posted online yet, but when it is, I’ll be sure to give you all a link.  The guy is great to talk to and a hell of a speaker as most of you know already.  I had a lot of fun with the interview. In fact, it was funny because the lady coordinating the video shoot said to aim for 2-3 minutes, and Mark and I turned to look at each other and I knew he was thinking the exact same thing I was.  “This lady is crazy, let’s talk for as long as we want to.” 

I also interviewed Kirk Munro of PowerGUI fame, also for TechEd Online, but I think a different group.  This was a neat overview of what Kirk does.  Dmitry did a great write-up which you can find here.

One evening, I had the distinct honor of being interviewed by Scott Hanselman on his Hanselminutes podcast.  I knew that Scott’s show leaned heavy to the dev side, so I dragged Kirk along with me.  You can listen to us on show #162 PowerShell 2.0.

Let’s see what else…I had a book signing, got to meet a few people there.  I attended Don Jones’ PowerShell top 10 tips session, and we walked together to the bookstore and hung out while he was signing his own book.  I actually signed more copies of my book during his signing than my own.  Thanks, Don!

Last, but not least, my birds-of-a-feather session turned out great.  We had between 20 and 30 people, and it was a very interactive audience for which I was thankful.  Steve also helped out a lot during the talk.

Whew! Enough typing for now.  I need to get some more scripts posted up here.  I think that’ll start back up again now that I’ve got a new job and all that. (P.S. for those who may have missed it, I’m now at Home Depot on the Enterprise Monitoring team.)

If you follow me on Facebook you might know that I picked up a 2008 Mini Cooper a few weeks ago. Very fun car. And it has this huge flat top that is begging for some decoration. My first thought was of course–huge freaking Powershell logo!

Now, companies actually make vinyl body decals and sell them at dealerships for this purpose, but they are really expensive. $450 and up. I know a guy who does signs, and who actually has a Mini with adverts for his company plastered all over it. I thought to ask and turns out he is willing to make me a deal.

Now we come to the question:

If I were to have a bunch of these things made, would any of you guys and gals buy one? I can’t afford to give them away like /n software does with their sticker, and these aren’t paper, but long lasting (and removable) vinyl. I was going to do them in two sizes: 10 in. and 2 ft. Small would run $25 and large would be $40.

Any takers?

For those of you who are going to TechEd this year in LA, I’d like to invite you to the Birds of a Feather session: "Practical PowerShell: Best Practices from the Field"
Date: Wednesday, 5/13/2009 at 8:00PM-9:00PM
Location: room TBA (check online session builder)
Description:

This session will encourage attendees to share their stories and best practices about using PowerShell to automate their IT operations. The moderator will also share his favorite tips and tricks, as well as to show people where they can find the best resources to help save their time and money. All levels of expertise welcome.

Also joining us will be special guest Ed Wilson from Microsoft. Ed is the Scripting Guy at the TechNet Script Center and author of Microsoft Windows PowerShell Step by Step.

I am very pleased to announce that my book, Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell: TFM is now available to pre-order for $41.99 at SAPIEN’s ScriptingOutput site. Estimated ship date is mid-April. [See update at end about availability at other e-tailers and shipping prices.]

Here’s what the book is about:

VMware is the king when it comes to virtualization. Windows PowerShell has gotten huge accolades as an extremely powerful tool for automation of IT tasks. These two technologies make a lot of sense together, and VMware is now making that happen with the release of their VI Toolkit for Windows.

In “Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell”, you will learn how to perform everything from simple ad-hoc reporting at the command-line (”are any of my virtual machines powered off?”) to complex scripts to automate a massive deployment of hundreds of virtual machines. Simple, yet powerful; concise, yet robust; you will enjoy using this new language to solve your old problems using less code than you thought possible.

If you are a system administrator responsible for managing a VMware Virtual Infrastructure (version 2.0 or above), or a standalone ESX Server (version 3.0 or above), then you need this book. Aimed at scripters of every level, the book starts off with a PowerShell primer and continues well into the internals of virtualization on the VMware platform.

Table of Contents

• Introduction - Why You Need This Book

1. Windows PowerShell Crash Course
2. Getting Started
3. Scripting with Virtual Infrastructure
4. Inventory and Reporting
5. Deployment and Configuration
6. Maintenance and Operations
7. Troubleshooting and Problem Resolution
8. Managing VMWare with PowerGUI

I have two pieces of cool news on my book, Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell: TFM. First, it should be going to print around April 15th! I think it’ll be available on pre-order before then, but I don’t know precisely when that will happen. Second, VMware has partnered with my publisher to make a 10% off coupon available to ISVs and IHVs. If you are currently on VMware’s TAP mailing list, look for that coupon to arrive in the March newsletter which should be in your inbox now.

One of our fans of the PowerScripting Podcast, Sean Kearney, aka ye110wbeard has produced a theme song for the show. It’s sung to the tune of “Panama”, by Van Halen, and he did a great job.  Apparently, he downloaded all of the episodes in order to come up with clips he could insert into the song.  I love the part where I introduce “the Dread Pirate Ed Wilson” 

Please go check out Sean’s podcast (full of other silly songs) and his blog. This guy is crazy, but in a good way.

Here are some of my other favorites of his:

• PowerShell Wizard
• The “Dead Cisco Sketch”

Gmail can now import and export filters as XML. This script will read in an XML file generated by Gmail (the Path parameter), and create from it a flat PSObject with Id, Updated, Name and Value fields. Since it is flat, you must use the Id field to correlate the filter criteria and actions. As far as I can tell, the first item in a filter is the criterion, and any subsequent ones describe the action to take. More info about filter import/export can be found here.

TODO:

• script the actual export of filters from gmail, removing need for working with the file at all 
• display in a treeview to better visualize the multiple items in each entry Out-GridView does this nicely

The script:

Oisin gave me this technique, so I thought I’d share with you all after doing some tweak to the script.  It’s not done, and I haven’t yet found my style on the V2 CTP3 advanced function parameters, so pardon the mess.

The code:

And here’s a dialog box in action.  You’ve seen these before, I’m sure. 

   1: PS > $job = Get-WmiObject Win32_NetworkAdapter -AsJob

   2: PS > $job

   3:  

   4: Id              Name            State      HasMoreData     Location             Command

   5: --              ----            -----      -----------     --------             -------

   6: 9               Job9            Running    False           localhost            Get-WMIObject

As you can see on line 4, there is a State property, and the job is still in progess.  I’ll check the job again after a few seconds:

   1: PS > $job

   2:  

   3: Id              Name            State      HasMoreData     Location             Command

   4: --              ----            -----      -----------     --------             -------

   5: 9               Job9            Completed  True            localhost            Get-WMIObject

Great, it’s been updated.  Always nice to work with live objects like this.  So, my next trick is to create a Where-Object filter to use when I’m doing a bunch of long-running jobs:

   1: PS > $job | Where-Object { $_.state -eq "Completed" }

   2: PS >

Ok, what the heck happened? That should have returned the job in question, right? The answer is that for some reason, the WMI guys used a differently named property, and “faked” the name using PowerShell’s output subsystem.

Here is an example showing what I mean:

   1: PS > $job | Get-Member *state*

   2:  

   3:    TypeName: Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.PSWmiJob

   4:  

   5: Name         MemberType Definition

   6: ----         ---------- ----------

   7: StateChanged Event      System.EventHandler`1[System.Management.Automation.JobStateEventArgs...

   8: JobStateInfo Property   System.Management.Automation.JobStateInfo JobStateInfo {get;}

   9:  

  10: PS > $job.JobStateInfo

  11:  

  12:                                           State Reason

  13:                                           ----- ------

  14:                                       Completed

So for now you will need to use this JobStateInfo property to work with the job state.  The good news is that I’ve raised this to the WMI team and hoepfully they will fix this for V2.

/me crosses fingers.

I had a bit of an obscure need recently at work to create a named pipe. This is usually a developer thing to do, but in order to perform some testing in our lab, we needed to produce systems that matched a certain criteria, and one of those was to have a named pipe with a certain name.

Turns out that it’s not hard to create named pipes in PowerShell, with one caveat. You must have .NET 3.5 installed on a system in order to do it. It can be done without this newer version of .NET, but the work required is more and I didn’t have the time to figure out that method.

As PowerShell is made with .NET 2.0, the 3.5 namespace that we need isn’t loaded by default. To remedy that is one line:

PS > [reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("system.core")

GAC    Version        Location
---    -------        --------
True   v2.0.50727     C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Core\3.5.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\Sys...

Or if you are using PowerShell v2:

PS > Add-Type -AssemblyName system.core

Once you’ve done that, creating the pipe is just one more line:

PS > $pipe = New-Object system.IO.Pipes.NamedPipeServerStream("Bob")
PS > $pipe

IsConnected       : False
IsAsync           : False
IsMessageComplete :
TransmissionMode  : Byte
InBufferSize      : 0
OutBufferSize     : 0
ReadMode          : Byte
SafePipeHandle    : Microsoft.Win32.SafeHandles.SafePipeHandle
CanRead           : True
CanWrite          : True
CanSeek           : False
Length            :
Position          :
CanTimeout        : False
ReadTimeout       :
WriteTimeout      :

Many thanks to Joel & Oisin for pointing out this .NET namespace and pointing out that I had to load system.core.

Got this cool email this morning:

Congratulations! On behalf of VMware, we would like to thank you for all the work you’ve done giving back to the virtualization community and sharing your expertise with others. We are pleased to present you with the VMware vExpert Award for 2009. VMware is giving this award to individuals who have contributed significantly to the community of VMware users over the past year.
VMware vExpert award winners will receive:
* An award certificate and gift
* Access to a private vExpert community
* vExpert logo to display on website or email signature
* Free subscription to conference session materials on VMworld.com
* Access to exclusive online events and other opportunities to participate in activities
* Inclusion in public vExpert directory
The vExpert award duration is one year (through February, 2010).

The vExpert program is new from VMware as of today (Feb 25th, 2009).  I presume they are modeling it after similar programs like Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional. Looks like I’m one of 300 people chosen for the inaugural award. Pretty neat!

You can read more about the program from its administrator, John Troyer on this VMTN blog post.

I didn’t plan on a big speech, but I will say: thanks, C-Dawg! Time to update my email and forum signatures. 

At some point in the past year I lost the war with my news feeds.  I fell so behind I no longer cared to read them at all.  I left my subscriptions on Bloglines idle and really read the bare minimum necessary to stay up on the PowerShell news for the podcast.

As some know, I recently got a T-Mobile G1 Android phone.  I found a pretty cool news reader for Android called Greed which syncs to Google Reader.  Now one thing I have to say about mobile apps in general, I usually don’t like to maintain data on them.  I’d much rather maintain something in a desktop or web app and then sync the settings or data to a mobile website, or preferrably, a mobile native application. It looks like Greed will give me what I want.

Therefore—Bloglines is out, and I’m interested in reading blogs again! Side benefit, and the point of the title of this post, is that I’ve updated my PowerShell blogroll and you can see it on the right-side of my website. Note that you can also see the blogroll and articles on this Google Reader page.

I’ll try to stay up-to-date with the best blogs that talk about PowerShell, because you know I like to cover them on the podcast. Ooh, I’ll also have to update my Get-PSBlogRoll script.  Not today.

You can find the full announcement here.  I’ll pull out just a couple of my favorite items from it:

• Includes ability to download scripts from PoshCode
• STA mode support means you can run PowerBoots.
• The current size of the console is overlaid as you resize the window.  Silly little feature, but as it was my idea, you can thank me. 
• PowerShell V2 CTP3 support! This means things like block comments will be interpreted correctly in the editor and console.

To download the beta you will need to register. It’s worth it.

I swear I won’t turn this blog into a baby pic gallery and start putting up babies r us ads

You can be one of the first to receive a copy of my book when it comes out (not long, I swear!), for free!  Be sure to listen to Episode 57 for details.

And let me give you a tip.  Last time I looked, we had around 1,800 subscribers who listen to the recorded show.  We typically have between 15 and 40 people show up to the live show on our Ustream channel. We’ll give away a book or two live, and save some for the “regular podcast”.  Odds are a bit better if you show up tonight for the live show. 

Marco Shaw asked recently on the PowerShell MVP mailing list if it would be possible to open a tab in the PowerShell V2 ISE (the GUI console which ships with CTP3) that would connect to a remote machine.  Turns out that it’s not that hard at all.  Ibrahim on the PowerShell team gave an answer which I”ll share with you.

Note: Vista or 2008 and PowerShell V2 CTP3 are required for WinRM (the remoting piece) to work, although we’re told this will be backported to XP and 2003 in the future.

Check out this screenshot, and the code to paste into your shell is just below.  In my example, I just connected to localhost, but you can connect to any remote box that is configured correctly.

$computername = Read-Host

$psise.OpenedRunspaces.Add()

sleep 3 # wait for profile to load

$psise.OpenedRunspaces[1].Execute("Enter-PSSession –computerName $computername")

$psise.OpenedRunspaces[1].DisplayName = "REMOTE: $computerName"

Thanks to Ibrahim, and to Marco who was too busy to blog this himself. 

I don’t normally do these short “check this out” posts because I don’t think they add much value.  I’d much rather take something I see on another website, expand on it, and then write about that.  But you know, sometimes you don’t have the time for a full write-up, and I didn’t want anyone to miss this little tidbit.

Be sure to check out Lance’s post about the difference between /n software’s PowerShell Server product, and PowerShell V2’s remoting feature which is based on WinRM.  Other than the fact that PS Server works on version 1 of PowerShell, the other big win is that it uses SSH.  This means your client can be ANYTHING.  His post has a nice screenshot of running PowerShell commands on a remote server from his iPhone.  Neat stuff!

I can’t imagine how much hair he’d have if full term…