Welcome to 2009. Here’s a deal for you. Welcome to 2009 - where we've got a LOT of great stuff lined up for you. First of all, our "Monsters of Tech" class in Denver this coming April is still open for registration, and we've lowered the per-student price to just $2,000 for the entire week. Check out the

PowerShell: Taking Some Time Off I'll be taking a two-week break from my weekly PowerShell column here to relax and enjoy the holidays with my family. See you next year!

PowerShell: Output Options One of PowerShell's truly amazing capabilities is its ability to convert objects into a variety of useful formats for reporting, archiving, sharing data, and more. Here's a fast rundown of the many built-in options; to use any of them, just pipe your objects to the output cmdlet, as in: Get-Service

PowerShell: Happy Holidays The holidays are upon us, and it's time to revisit an oldie-but-goodie from the TechNet Script Center - "Jingle Bells," done in Windows PowerShell. Seriously. Get the code here, and we'll get back to "serious" PowerShell in a few weeks (grin).

PowerShell: PowerTab This is PowerTab. Get it now. It's free, and it really helps make using PowerShell easier by providing command completion ("IntelliSense", only text-based, not graphical pop-up menus) within Windows PowerShell. That's it. Easy tip this week - if you're not using PowerTab, you're working to damned hard.

Registration Now Open: MONSTERS of TECH Training! Concentrated Technology is ready to bring you up to speed on today's most critical new technologies and products: Windows PowerShell, Windows Server 2008, and more - all from the most experienced and popular experts in the world! We've announced our first 2009 class dates in Denver, CO, and additional dates

PowerShell: Dates and Times There's often times when you'll need to work with dates. Perhaps you're archiving information and need to establish a cutoff date, or perhaps you're examining dates from AD and need to calculate how many days it's been since a certain date. PowerShell generally makes it pretty easy to do. Need

PowerShell: Here-Strings Sometimes you need to work with really long string data - and it can seem like a pain in the neck. For example, suppose you want to construct an HTML table, and you want to use a template: $template = "<tr>`n" $template += " <td>{0}</td>`n"$template += "<td>{1}</td>`n" $template += "</tr>`n"

Graphical PowerShell Apps See Jeff's Scripting Blog Plus for more information - SAPIEN has released "PrimalForms," which is a graphical UI designer that emits PowerShell script code. So you visually design your GUI, and then PrimalForms translates that into the PowerShell code necessary to actually create the GUI. PrimalForms doesn't need to be

PowerShell: The Formatting Rules Why does PowerShell sometimes display data as a list, and sometimes as a table? Try running these three commands: Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem Get-Service Get-Process One is a list, the other is a table. Why? And why were those particular properties displayed? When PowerShell needs to display objects, it follows a precise,

[UPDATE] We Want to Come Train You - Maybe for Free Greg and I are looking to put together some classes in 2009 - public, in-person training on Windows PowerShell, What's New and Changed in Win2008 (which will help set you up for Win7, too, of course), and Terminal Services. They'd be delivered in a week-long format of expert-led training. To

Weekly Shell: When PowerShell Fails, and How MS is Fixing It It should come as no surprise that I'm a big fan of PowerShell. So it may come as a surprise that I recognize several failings in the shell - and it may come as a bigger surprise that Microsoft's PowerShell product team agrees with me on a lot of them.

Weekly Shell: STOP SCRIPTING THIS INSTANT! I sometimes have to laugh about the reasons admins will give me for not adopting Windows PowerShell. For example, one fellow at a conference told me that he didn't want to learn to script. He then turned around later in the class and belted out this Cmd.exe doozy: FOR /F

Now With a Full Week’s Supply of Content! Beginning next week, we'll be bringing you new, fully-technical content every day of the week! Our goal is to help you learn new technologies, new tricks, and new decision-making criteria so that you can be more effective and efficient. We'll do this through short, easily-digested articles arranged in series so

Weekly Shell: Get Your Exchange On Are you having trouble getting started with Windows PowerShell? Well, if you're in an Exchange Server 2007 environment, there's the perfect excuse to start. And rather than diving in and writing mega-scripts from scratch, why not take a "cookbook" approach? A "cookbook" is just what it sounds like: A collection