No excuse now...

After a particularly uninspiring and pretty awful week at work, there was one nugget of tech goodness that I uncovered this afternoon: Powershell is now available for deployment via WSUS! I'd already built a deployment script using VB that did the pre-req checks etc but I'd delayed using it in the hope that it would appear on my WSUS boxes. It did earlier this week (it's classed under Feature Packs), so early next week I plan to do a couple of test deployments and then release it to PCs in my department. The really good thing is that I can now start putting some of my dev scripts (each time I put a new VBS script into production I produce the equivalent PowerShell script) into use live environment.

If PowerShell appearing as an update on my WSUS boxes was the highlight, you kind of appreciate how bad the last working week was....

Well deserved

Found out today that Jeffrey Snover has been given the accolade within Microsoft of Distinguished Engineer, which according to the front page is "an acknowledgement of the key role being played by a technical contributor, whose high level of performance, technical vision, expertise and world-class leadership is instrumental in developing and driving products and standards for Microsoft and the technology industry into the future." It just goes to prove how importantly MS view PowerShell. There are only about 40 DEs in MS so it's some achievement.

Also linked on the same page was the list of Microsoft Technical Fellows. The names of Mark Russinovich and David Cutler feature here and should be well known to IT Pros. Some of the other names though may not be so well known, for example I didn't know that Chuck Thacker worked on the first Tablet PC.

What is really enlightening is that when you read about what the DEs and TFs know and do, it proves that when they present at events like TechEd they are only barely scratching the surface of a given subject with the audience.

Monkey surfing

I have been sounded out about doing something for Learning at Work Day, specifically something with Powershell, maybe just a couple of useful short one-liners. Having given it some thought, I did realise that an easier introduction, assuming that the audience are not completely petrified of a any sort of CLI, would be to demo that anything you currently do from command prompt you can also done from a Powershell prompt.

But then the realisation hit me that if someone checks my blog they will learn of what is in-store and then not bother showing up when I run my session! The reason for my fear was based on the Infinite Monkey Theorem: given the amount of non-work related surfing done here would it be inevitable that staff may eventually come across my not-so-publicised blog? But my fears were then allayed, to stumble upon this would mean that they would have to tear themselves away from Facebook first....

Geek-out with Channel 9

One of my RSS feeds is to Channel 9, and early December '08 I came across a video of a conversation between Erik Meijer and Jeffrey Snover, the creator and partner architect of PowerShell. I've attended a few presentations by Jeffrey at TechEd over the last couple years and his passion for all things PowerShell is both obvious and infectious, but this article goes 'under the hood' and covers areas such as how it's designed, the thinking behind it's architecture and how some of the new features in v2, such as transactions, actually work.

It's not going to teach you how to use PowerShell, but if you're already using it and want to geek-out for about an hour I can thoroughly recommend it.

You can find the the article here.

BITS and pieces...

Over the last couple of days I've been playing with the new cmdlets that ship with PowerShell v2 CTP3 that let you hook into BITS. If you need to move large volumes of data around, don't want to melt your network gear, and want to be able to cater for users who may reboot on a whim and then want your file transfer that was 98% complete pick up where it left off then BITS is for you. Sysadmins have previously been able to do this using bitsadmin from the command-line, but now you can hook into BITS through PowerShell. So far all I've done is knock up a pretty simple script to transfer a 1GB file from a fileshare, display an updated '% complete' value every few seconds, then tidy up after the successful transfer. It's still amusing to pull the network while the script is running and watch it just sit there patiently, not throwing a strop and falling into a heap, and then carrying on when connectivity is restored.

Here's the original article on the Windows PowerShell blog, which explains it pretty well, and PowerShell v2 CTP3 can be downloaded here.

Fries with that...?

Had to do a presentation to a number of colleagues on the features that Microsoft have introduced with Internet Explorer 8, highlighting those that increase productivity (do more, more easily) and the improvements to security (do more, and do it more safely). I've been using it since beta 1 and really like it, finding it a pain when I'm forced to used either IE7 or IE6 on other machines. And when asked am very enthusiastic about it with people probably wishing that they'd never asked!

That said, after today I think I'll keep my enthusiasm to myself and not waste it doing presentations trying to instill it into others. In fact, working at the golden arches feels like it would be so much more rewarding at the moment...

UPDATE: Hmm, maybe given what I read here I shouldn't be indicating that my work was in any way unrewarding. Maybe as I didn't say 'boring' I'll be okay. Not that I would ever say my job is boring of course...

Windows 7 on a netbook?

After a few delays the Toshiba NB100 netbook that was ordered a while back arrived at work today. The delays were not due to any failing of our own internal ordering processes at work, merely that the not-so-conscientious dim-witted loon of a courier felt that when delivering to a University establishment he could simply leave the package with the first person he found in reception providing that they would offer a signature in return. Needless to say, the first NB100 that was delivered never made it as far as my desk, but we now probably have a student who is the proud owner of a new netbook....

Anyway, I recently came across this on Technet Edge recently so thought that I'd give installing Windows 7 with a USB stick a go. About 25 minutes later the install had finished, all devices detected, and after installing some AV software it was done. Okay,so it's not the most rapid machine ever (base score of 2.0 due to the hard-disk, Mr Atom scored slightly better at 2.2), but it boots up in about 30 seconds and the performance is more than adequate, and even the Aero interface works! I'll try a few more things over the next few days (install Office 2007, join it to the domain) and then palm it off onto a colleagues for testing ie: once the novelty has worn off. If I get any feedback that is relevant / interesting / printable I'll post it, just don't hold your breath...