I recently played around with SAPIEN’s VersionRecall, and thought I’d share a bit about the experience. As a note, SAPIEN provided me with a license key to use. VersionRecall is advertised as a simple, single-user version control system “for the rest of us.” There are no servers, no databases, and nothing complex, according to the marketing copy.
Setup is quick - a 3-screen wizard and you’re done. Installation took under a minute. When you first launch the product, it attempts to find all the places on your computer where you might store scripts, so that it can connect those to a version-control repository. You can skip that bit, but it only took a few moments on my virtual machine. It found my DSC scripts, my PowerShell modules, and several other places I’d dropped scripts. You then indicate where you’d like your version-control repository - this is where old versions of files will be saved. You can also pick a certificate, to have the software automatically sign scripts each time you make a new version. That’s a subtle and very cool feature - and it’s a way to make AllSigned a more convenient execution policy.
I selected an option to have my version control repository updated every day at 4:30pm. That seems to let the software capture a snapshot of any changed files at that time every day; it was clear that you could also manually submit an update to the repository using VersionRecall or Windows’ own File Explorer.
From there, you’re in an Explorer-like view. It includes a tab for each folder where you store scripts. I find that I like that approach a lot - I tend to organize my scripts that way. I’ve got my modules in one spot, some sample scripts in another, stuff I’m playing with in a third, and so on - so the tabbed approach fits my organizational style. You can open files for editing right there. I don’t have PrimalScript installed on this test machine, but files opened in the ISE just fine. Ribbon buttons let you open the shell, the ISE, or SAPIEN’s PrimalScript or PowerShell Studio products.
As part of our commitment to being a transparent, community-owned organization, I wanted to share the basic budget for the upcoming Summit. Now that registration is cut off, we have most of our final numbers. Keep in mind that, at live events, things “on the ground” can change quickly - so these are, at present, only our expectations “going in.”
- $113,833.51 in net registration fees. This is after paying credit card transaction fees.
- -$398.00 for event insurance (already paid)
- -$76,466.04 for the venue, which includes A/V, F&B, room rental, etc. (already paid)
- -$9,335.01 for speaker lodging (hotel)
- -$3,000 for professional event management (including travel for the event manager)
- -$1,490 for our registration web site (already paid)
- -$1,710.51 for deposit on the European Summit
- -$7,500 for speaker reimbursement
That last number is presently the big question; we have some speakers who paid for their registration, and we need to reimburse them. That’s probably about $4,000. We have another $2,500 in promised travel offset fees to speakers doing 3 sessions. We’re trying to reimburse additional travel expenses for other speakers so they’re not totally out of pocket; the final number may be more than $7,500.
Right now, that puts us at an event profit of roughly $13,933.95. Again, some of that may end up going to additional speaker reimbursement; the rest will help fund PowerShell.org ongoing activities (like Azure hosting and so forth; I’ll share a full annual operating budget in June, but it’s about $17,000 per year). We have about $20k in payments coming up for the European Summit.
We have approximately $92,000 on-hand; much of that will go to the expenses above that are still pending. We should end April with around $65,000 on-hand - a lot of that comes from earning back a $40,000 pre-payment for the N.A. Summit that we made in fiscal 2013-2014. We’ll use some of that $65k to cover the remaining $20k fees on the European Summit; the rest of our cash-on-hand will help provide deposits for the 2015 N.A. Summit, and to fund ongoing operations for 2014-2015. We’re in good financial shape - we’re making a bit more than we need, but not very much - which is right where we want to be.
The good news is that, between the Summits and our generous corporate sponsors, we’re on track to actually find the $17k wish-list budget we’ve put together (which we’re still researching and tweaking; as stated, I’ll share the full thing in June). That means we’ll be able to start spinning up services like the VERIFIED EFFECTIVE program, monthly TechSession webinars, and so on.
If you’re attending PowerShell Summit NA 2014 (or wish you were), we have some new logo items for purchase! Buy ’em now and wear ’em to the Summit, including a baseball jersey and a polo shirt. Visit our Zazzle store to buy (or the Canadian store, to save a bit on shipping if you live up there).
Note that the items may take about 24 hours to become visible, so check on April 15th in the afternoon if you don’t see them immediately.
See you at the Summit!
Paul Higinbotham’s session on threading in PowerShell has been changed, because his content would have overlapped with other sessions. Instead, Paul will be presenting:
PowerShell Debugging Enhancements
A number of script debugging enhancements were added to PowerShell 4.0 and the WMF 5.0 preview release. In this talk I will discuss these new debugging features and demonstrate how they work. This will include the new support for remote debugging, debugging workflow scripts, debugging PowerShell jobs, ISE enhancements for remote debugging, and the new “Break All” command.
We’ll update the schedule grid and abstract document.
We’ve just finished a massive re-do of all 7 PowerShell.org free ebooks.
First, they’re now hosted in a public OneDrive folder. This means you can quickly and easily view them online, download a DOCX, or download a PDF. Anytime, anywhere.
Second, we’ve had folks go through and make the formatting more consistent, using a more modern font and somewhat “airier” spacing. Hopefully that translates to “nicer to read.” All the original code is also accessible, and available for one-click downloading. Note that .PS1 files may open for viewing; you need to checkmark the file to download it.
Uploads are now proceeding, so depending on when you read this, some files might still be in progress. The GitHub versions (which were problematic for some folks to download) will be removed shortly. Please update your links; https://powershell.org/ebooks has already been updated.
Enjoy!
The monthly Charlotte PowerShell Users Group meeting will be held tomorrow, April 3rd at 6PM EDT. The meeting is held at the Microsoft Charlotte Office (8055 Microsoft Way, Charlotte, NC).
This looks to be an awesome meeting with guest speaker Jason Walker. Jason will demonstrate running PowerShell scripts in a cool and novel way – from a website. If you would like to attend, please jump on over to the MeetUp page and let us know you are coming.
PowerShell MVP Joel Bennett will present about authoring PowerShell modules, including tips, tricks and best practices for writing modules and functions that work well together (and behave properly in the pipeline) … and…
NOTE: if you have QUESTIONS about PowerShell modules which you would like addressed, you can start adding them to the Q&A bar (and voting to rank them) already. Just click the “Q&A” icon overlay on the video placeholder:
https://plus.google.com/hangouts/onair/watch?hid=hoaevent%2Fcval1ku1pro5uijqk4fnmfk45lo&hl=en&t=0
OSTools - download for my class in Oslo this week.
Here’s some more: share
What sorts of things would you want to configure via DSC that don’t already have a resource?
NB: Focusing on the core Windows OS and its components only; Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, and other products are off the table for this discussion.
For example, I want a “log file rotator” resource, that lets me specify a log file folder, an archive folder, and a pair of dates. Files older than one date are moved from the log folder to the archive folder; archived files older than the second date are deleted.
I’d also like a File Permissions resource. Specify a folder or file, optional recursion, and a set of access control entries (in plain English terms), and it’ll make sure the permissions stay that way.
Maybe also a User Home Folder resource, which would (a) ensure a folder exists for a given set of user accounts, and (b) ensures a set of “template” permissions, so that each individual user has the rights to their folder, plus rights given to global users like admins.
What resources would YOU like to have to ease configuration and maintenance in YOUR environment? Drop a comment!
