PowerShell

I have a confession to make: I’ve developed a failed open source project! There I’ve said it, it’s now public knowledge and I can hang my head in shame… lead me to the village stocks so you can all throw rotting vegetables at me.

Happily, I don’t feel like that. Failure is, well, no big deal. Of course it does sting a little bit that I wasted an awful lot of time developing the software. What could I have done with the time had I not written the 11,184 lines of code Ohloh says I wrote? Well, I’ll never know, but…

As a follow up to the Windows based structured systems management post, I have found a network monitor that does have some dynamic abilities.

PolyMon is an open source network monitor written for the .NET environment. Steven Murawski has written PoSHMon, a series of PowerShell cmdlets for interacting with PolyMon dynamically. Whilst neither PolyMon or PoShMon are particularly full featured or mature, they do at least show what is possible.

If anybody knows of any commercial network management tools with PowerShell support for dynamic structured systems management, I’d love to hear about it. 😉

Mike Wilbur provides a great post on scheduling a PowerShell script to periodically run using Windows 2003. Somehow I think that’s gonna prove very handy when used in conjunction with PowerTime. 😄

I am currently in the process of broadening my knowledge of Windows Powershell and I thought I’d post some of the excellent resources I’ve found. Many are available for free online, some you’ll have to shell out money for. The book, Windows Powershell in Action, is well worth buying if you want to gain an understanding of how Powershell works.

Tutorials

• PowerShell Pro Tutorial
• Arstechnica Tutorial – created prior to the rename to Powershell but still worth your time
• The DFO Show – introducing Windows PowerShell [video]
• Computer Performance Powershell Tutorial

Community

• powershellcommunity.org – powershell oriented blogs, forums & cmdlet directory

Books

• Windows Powershell in Action – the book from one of the founders of the Windows Powershell team

Blogs

• PowerShell team blog – the blog by the people who are writing Powershell
• The Powershell Guy
• Get-Powershell blog
• Dmitry’s PowerBlog – Dmitry Sotnikov’s view on PowerShell, PowerGUI and much else

PowerTime is now available on Google Code. You can even browse the code without having to download anything.

The only problem I ran into was the size of the ECAD data set exceeded the quota given to new projects. I’ve now split the ECAD data set so that it is available for download but isn’t versioned inside Subversion.

I’ll be back onto PowerTime real soon now. Just having a rest doing some web work at the moment. Expect a first beta by the end of June.

Whilst we are on the topic of PowerShell, may as well mention PowerGUI as well.

PowerGUI gives you a nice GUI based interface to the command line PowerShell. Dimitry Sotnikov runs a great blog around PowerShell, PowerGUI and Quest’s other free tools. Quest have got into PowerShell big time.

Just a quick heads up about Windows PowerShell. Looks a really neat way to automate a lot of dull, repetitive admin tasks.

Windows PowerShell version 1 has now been released and is available as a free download for Windows XP and beyond.