Force Multiplication through IT Automation
Jason Hofferle
I’m usually pretty happy with the default PowerShell prompt that displays the current path, however sometimes I just want a generic prompt for screenshots or a demonstration. With an infinite number of custom PowerShell prompts possible, it became apparent that the appropriate prompt depends on the current task. By copying the Set-Prompt function into $Env:UserProfile\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\profile.ps1, [...]
Checking boxes gets old quickly, and I’ve installed and checked those little boxes for the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) on Windows 7 enough times for it to be annoying. I just wanted a static script with the names of the features to enable, but Xenophane’s Blog has some examples of extracting the output of [...]
Last night I gave a presentation on using version control for the Tampa PowerShell User Group. This presentation was mostly a demo of using TortoiseHg, and how it can be useful for IT Pros that need to manage production scripts. Here is the slide deck and links to more information. Version Control for PowerShell Slide [...]
Microsoft released the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Management Framework 3.0, which includes PowerShell v3. This can be installed on Windows 7 SP1 and Server 2008 R2 SP1. This is a pre-release version to allow the IT community to review the software and provide feedback. Windows Management Framework 3.0 – Community Technology Preview [...]
Microsoft released the Windows 8 developer preview last night, which includes PowerShell version 3! The IT Pros that couldn’t sleep last night are reporting hundreds of new cmdlets and functions over what’s available in Windows 7. The Windows 8 developer preview can be downloaded at the Windows Dev Center.
Software developers wouldn’t think of working on a project without some type of version control for their source code. So why is this is a rare topic for IT Pros that maintain production scripts with hundreds or thousands of lines of code? Version control, revision control and source control are terms used to describe the [...]
When I needed to build a collection of PowerShell resources for our internal IT personnel, I had trouble finding a comprehensive list of all the freely available eBooks out there. I thought it would be worth spending a few minutes collecting these links in a single place. If you know of any that I’m missing, [...]
After my last post on PowerShell Remoting performance, I received an email asking if I had tried Split-Job. It works by creating multiple runspaces so that a single command can be run against multiple computers in parallel without remoting enabled. The MaxPipelines parameter controls the number of simultaneous runspaces. I gave the function a try [...]
Using fan-out PowerShell remoting has some amazing performance benefits, but it can be difficult to find real-world metrics that describe just how efficient it is. It’s challenging to communicate how powerful it can be in a demonstration, because typically a speaker at a conference will only have a couple of virtual machines. Fan-out remoting just [...]
