Pavleck.NET

If you’re still hesitant to dive into powershell, you’re not alone. To someone who is a light scripter or has limited or no development background it can seem like a daunting task. A lot of the examples you’ll find are easy and simple, but Write-Host –Fore Green “Hello World! I’m using PowerShell” won’t help you with automating all of those tasks out there.

There are a few places to go, and a few books to read, to help you get up to speed with it.
One of the most promising looking resources would have to be Doug Finke’s “Try PowerShell”.

Try PowerShell  is an interactive PowerShell tutorial created with PowerShell using WPF¹ and PowerBoots.
With it you can easily try out PowerShell commands just by clicking on them, no typing needed. You can search for particular commands, run them, and even edit them to see what happens if you change something. This is an awesome tool I don’t think enough people know about.

Read more…

1. Wikipedia: Windows Presentation Foundation [↩]

The new Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for OpsMgr 2007 R2 has been released.

If you’ve never checked it out, I strongly encourage you to – especially if you have a new install coming up. The IPD guide walks you through all aspects of the planning and design of an OpsMgr network. After you’ve gone through it you’ll know how to:

• Define the scope of the project
• Identify necessary management packs and product connectors
• Determine how monitoring will be implemented
• Determine the number of management groups and agent security strategy
• Design and place the OpsMgr server roles and databases
• Design the notification system
• And much much more!

These guides are pretty invaluable, especially if you’re not an expert in the technology.
So what are you waiting for? Download it now – and when you’re done, check out the rest of the design guides, too!

Note: The version number is still 1.0 and the published date remains June 2008 – I sent a note off to ask them to increment that.