AD Management in a Month of Lunches"“ chapter 9 in MEAP

The MEAP for AD Management in a Month of Lunches has been updated with the release of chapter 9 on managing group policies

State of the Games

As of Monday at 5pm Pacific time (which is Tuesday morning, 00:00 hours GMT), the 2013 Scripting Games’ first event will conclude. That means the first event is open for community voting - so get on it!
Remember, some of the best prizes - including a free pass to the 2014 PowerShell Summit - are reserved for folks who offer their votes and comments.
Incoming new registrations for the Games will not be able to compete in Event 1 at this point, but they can jump in with Event 2 (and subsequent events) if desired.
We presently have 1100 registered participants - which may include people who just signed up to spectate and vote, as well as our judges. 475 are registered in the Beginner track, 307 in Advanced, and 318 are presently view-only (meaning they’re just voting, not submitting entries). As I write this, we’ve only got 218 entries - but there are still a few more hours to get them in.

Comparing SQL Server table schemas with PowerShell

As a SQL Server DBA or SQL Server developer sometimes is necessary to know whether two tables have equal schemas or not. For example, a few months ago I had to consolidate two SQL Server instances in just one. One of the main problems were the collisions between Databases and Tables. I found out that both instances had Databases with equal name and the same thing happened with tables inside those databases. When consolidating databases is very important to make sure that users and apps will find the same schema they were used to find before consolidation, so in order to consolidate databases it will be necessary to find tables with different schemas, merge them and solve conflicts.

CIM cmdlets vs WMI cmdlets"“speed of execution

One question that came up at the summit was the comparative speed of execution of the new CIM cmdlets vs the old WMI cmdlets. No of us knew the answer because we"™d never tried measuring the speed.

I decided to perform some tests.

This first test is accessing the local machine. In both cases the cmdlets are using COM. WMI uses COM and CIM will use COM if a ““ComputerName parameter isn”™t used.

Time for D-CRUD?

I was thinking on the plane back from the PowerShell summit about the CRUD activities. They are a concept we have inherited from the database world:

C = Create

R = Read

U = Update

D= Delete

Create, Update and Delete correspond directly to the PowerShell verbs ““ New,Set and Remove respectively.

The Read action corresponds to the Get verb.

Well sort of.

Get-* is used in two distinct scenarios. Firstly we know of an object and we we want to read its properties ““ for example:

Scripting Games 2013 have started

The 2013 Scripting Games kicked off during the PowerShell summit. Event 1 is open and you can submit entries up until 23:59:59 GMT on 29 April 2013. Voting on the entries starts at at midnight on 30 April.

You can enter and you can vote on the entries. This is a community games run by powershell.org ““ all are welcome.

If you haven”™t entered yet there is still plenty of time to get you entry in for event 1. Start by reviewing the information at https://powershell.org/the-scripting-games/

PowerShell Summit"“thank you

I"™d like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who attended the PowerShell Summit this last week. The Summit was a success ““ in no small part due to you. Your questions, and discussions, are what this is all about.

It was a pleasure meeting you all and I hope to return next year ““ I hope to see many of you there as well.

Forums Migration Schedule

Here’s the schedule for our Forums migration:
From Now until May 4th, the old forums will remain online and in-use. However, you should consider creating an account here on the “new” site (distinguishable by the different visual theme). Your new account will have no connection to the old one, and may be a Twitter, Facebook, Live, or other login. To create an account, just click “Login” at the top-left of any site page (in the dark gray toolbar).
On May 4th we will activate the new forums. From then on, the Forums menu link will go there. The old forums will remain available at https://powershell.org/discuss. You can continue to use the old forums to wrap-up old topics, or if the new ones stop working for some reason.
On May 13th we will shut down the old forums and direct everyone to the new ones.
By May 20 we will have migrated the content from the old forums into the new ones. These will be imported as static threads that are closed for new messages, but they’ll still be searchable.

Recording the PowerShell Summit

So, we did have one enterprising fella use his Webcam to record the Summit sessions he attended. Once he gets with me, we’ll get those online so you can see.
We are trying to think really hard about formal recordings for next time. It depends a lot on what folks want. For example:

• Pointing a camera at the front of the room is easy and cheap. We worry that the audio might suck and that you might not be able to read on-screen code - although many presenters make their code/slides available for download.
• Putting software on presenters’ machines to capture what they do is out of the question. There are MORE than enough moving parts already going on in the room - this just won’t work out consistently.
• We can get one-button-recording devices that capture everything the speaker does on-screen, and an audio feed. You don’t get to SEE the speaker, and these are about $1000 each, plus sundry cables and adapters. For several hundred more, we can add a picture-in-picture from a camera feed.

So we can do cheap-o… well, cheaply. And if folks are happy with that, we’ll do it. We can do pretty awesome-looking for pretty-expensive… and that’s going to require a fundraising campaign. We aren’t Microsoft, and recording three rooms, along with possible general sessions, is going to take about $8-$12k in equipment. Our goal, however, would be to give the videos away for free once a year’s event sells to its “break even” attendance point.
Live streaming won’t happen. Meeting venues get like $5,000 per day for a 5-10Mbps pipe. Yeah, you thought they made money off the $80/gallon coffee. We just can’t afford the bandwidth to livestream. We’re not even always sure we can turn on WiFi for people to check e-mail. It’s that expensive.
Please drop some comments. Knowing what kind of video people are willing to accept will really help us plan this out for next time, and we need a lot of lead time to do that.

Meet the Scripting Games Judges: "Scripting Guy" Ed Wilson

Ed Wilson is the Microsoft Scripting Guy and a well-known scripting expert. He writes the twice daily Hey Scripting Guy! blog (the number 1 blog on TechNet). He has also spoken at TechEd and at the Microsoft internal TechReady conferences. He is a Microsoft-certified trainer who has delivered a popular Windows PowerShell workshop to Microsoft Premier Customers worldwide. He has written 11 books including 8 on Windows scripting that were published by Microsoft Press. He has also contributed to nearly a dozen other books. He has two Microsoft Press Windows PowerShell 3.0 books: Windows PowerShell 3.0 Step by Step and Windows PowerShell 3.0 First Steps. Ed holds more than 20 industry certifications, including Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). Prior to coming to work for Microsoft, he was a senior consultant for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner where he specialized in Active Directory design and Exchange implementation. In his spare time, he enjoys woodworking, underwater photography, and scuba diving.