• Day one - Windows PowerShell Express – will cover such topics as running commands and using the pipeline, importing and exporting data, core cmdlets – sorting, grouping, comparing, and more!
• Day two – Windows PowerShell Intermediate Topics – covers understanding and using Windows  management instrumentation, administering active directory, understanding PowerShell sessions and administering WinRM, and doesn’t stop there.
• Day three – Windows PowerShell Scripting Fundamentals – includes Windows PowerShell security, basic and parameterized scripts, advanced operators, Dot-sourcing and more.
• Day four – Advanced Windows PowerShell Scripting – concludes the session with just some of these topics - utilizing the underlying .NET framework types, debugging techniques, using modules to package and redistribute scripts.

Our class is being held in Chicago, IL at the Inn of Chicago, October 25-28, 2010.  Visit ScriptingOutpost.com for more information.  Sign up today.

Technorati Tags: don jones, powershell, SAPIEN, training

As I mentioned last time, PowerShell requires some extra work. PrimalScript redirects stdin, stdout and stderr when capturing the output of a process and PowerShell.exe does not react well to that. This has been a PowerShell problem since V1 and wasn’t fixed with V2. Basically the PowerShell process will just hang and do nothing when you redirect stdin. I am assuming that if PowerShell sees a redirected stdin stream it just awaits commands from there and ignores anything else.

I have created a little helper app that will take care of that:

ftp://ftp.sapien.com/exec64.zip

Download and extract the executable to your PrimalScript 2009 installation folder.

Right click anywhere in the tools browser and select “Customize…” and add a new tool in a group of your choice.

Name the new tool “PowerShell (64 bit) or whatever your like and set the properties as follows:

Command line: Exec64

Arguments: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\V1.0\powershell.exe -NonInteractive \”&’$File$’\”

Initial Directory: $FileDir$

Check “Capture Output”

In order to run the current script in 64 bit mode you only have to click on the icon.

Technorati Tags: 64 bit, powershell, PrimalScript

Let’s take a look at how the Apple iPad handles our e-books. The Apple iPad has a 9.7″ (diagonal) display with a resolution of 1024×768. There are several applications that can display PDF files available on the iPad including DropBox, an awesome tool for accessing files across various devices including your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod and iPad. Recently, Apple updated its iBooks e-book reader to display PDF files, and it does a great job doing so.

Getting the PDF onto the iPad/iPhone/iPod is very easy. You can simply drop the PDF file into iTunes then sync the device. This places the e-book directly into iBooks. An alternate method is to drop the e-book onto DropBox on your computer. Then open it with DropBox on the iPad. There you can view it either with the DropBox PDF viewer or tell DropBox to open the file with iBooks.

PDF e-book in iBooks on iPad

Above is an image of our Windows PowerShell e-book as displayed vertically in iBooks on an iPad. For most people, this is quite readable. For those of you with failing eyes like mine, this is a bit too small. iBooks helps with that by allowing you to pinch-zoom to enlarge the image.

Zoomed in horizontal formatting

Above is a zoomed in horizontal image of the same text as before. VERY easy to read and quite clear!

Navigating through the PDF is also quite easy. Moving from one page to the next is done by simply swiping with your finger from right to left, or left to right to go to the previous page. You can also tap the right or left margins to transition to the next/previous page.

Thumbnails of pages

Tap at the top of the screen and a tool bar pops up with buttons to control brightness, add bookmarks, search and display thumbnails of the pages. Using this feature, you can navigate the thumbnails to the Table of Contents. Display that page and even use the built in hyper-links to quickly navigate to another topic simply by tapping on the topic name!

The Apple iPhone 4 has a 3.5″ (diagonal) display with 960×640 resolution. Older versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch have the same size display at 480×320 resolution. Below is an image of the same e-book as viewed in iBooks on an iPhone 4.

e-book displayed on iPhone

This image is quite small, not readable for my eyes. But again, you can pinch-zoom to make it bigger. You can scroll the text around with your finger to view any text that has been clipped due to the zooming.

Zoomed-in horizontal format on iPhone

Unfortunately, we do not have the option to change the actual font size in our PDFs. While this would also aid in the reading of the text, it plays havoc with our code formatting. SAPIEN is experimenting with various tools that would help us transfer our PDFs to ePub format (the supported format for iBooks, Sony eReader and the Nook.) Once we can create properly formatted e-books using these tools, we hope to offer our e-books in the ePub format. This would give our users a wide variety of devices from which they can read their SAPIEN Press e-books.

Technorati Tags: DropBox, e-books, iBooks, iPad, iPhone, iPod, SAPIEN Press, SAPIENPress

In Visual PowerShell 2011 users have the ability to add any event handler by using the “Add Events” context menu option in the Designer:

(Fig 1: Use the “Add Events” context menu option to add event handlers to any control.)

In addition, Visual PowerShell offers the option to create multiple event handlers at once. To facilitate this, the application displays a list of available events in the Add Events Dialog. By  simply checking the corresponding events in the dialog, a user can create multiple event handlers at one time.

(Fig 2: Add Event Dialog – Displays a list of available events. Hover the cursor over the event to display help information.)

Once the Create Button is clicked, the application will automatically generate a new event block for each of the checked events.

(Fig 3: The generated event handler script blocks)

After the event handlers are added to a control, a user can quickly edit them by using the Designer’s  “Go to Event” context menu option.

(Fig 4: Use the Go To Event option to edit a specific control’s event handler in the script editor.)

As demonstrated, the event handler creation process can now be handled directly in the Designer without having to access the Property Pane.

Technorati Tags: PrimalForms, Visual PowerShell, WinForm

Friday evening I attended the Speaker Dinner where I had the opportunity to meet with Max Trinidad, one of our SAPIEN MVPs, who helped organize the SQL Saturday PowerShell track. Max is an energetic, friendly, overall great guy. He also happens to currently be the only PowerShell MVP in South Florida. I also had the opportunity to meet with the other SQL Saturday speakers, including some of the organizers.

Speaker Dinner: Joe Healy from Microsoft (left), David Corrales (middle), Max Trinidad (right)

The following day I had the pleasure of presenting a sneak preview of Visual PowerShell 2011. I demonstrated the capabilities of Visual PowerShell as well as a slew of new features. At the end of the session, two lucky attendees walked away with a free copy of PrimalForms 2009. It was a great group and I would like to thank them once again for attending the session. I’m also looking forward to the next user group.

VPS 2011 preview at SQL Saturday #40

I have to admit that I’m really excited about Visual PowerShell 2011 and have been receiving a lot of positive feedback.

Technorati Tags: SAPIEN MVP, SAPIEN Tour, SQLSaturday, Visual PowerShell

Anyway, the Windows Script Host for VBScript and JScript files has a registry setting that allows scripts to run uninhibited or only if they are signed. The default is to run everything, so you better use group policy to change that.

PowerShell initially does not run any scripts whatsoever, its default for execution policy is “Restricted”. Type Get-ExecutionPolicy in your PowerShell console to see your setting.

If you try to run a script you get an error like this:

File C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\profile.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see “get-help about_signing” for more details.

So one could conclude from that that PowerShell is more secure. But wait… Regardless of your current execution policy anyone with access to your system can do this:

PowerShell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File “Hello world2.ps1″

and run any powershell file they’d like without further prompting.

It helps a little that PS1 files are not associated with PowerShell.exe in a way that allows inadvertent execution, but if someone wants to run a malicious script and has gained access to run powershell.exe, your execution policy setting is no hurdle.

So don’t trust the defaults; keep your systems locked up and execute caution. Don’t rely on any language to give you security. It is your job to create and maintain that.

Additionally, both Windows Script Host and PowerShell use simple text files for their scripts. Obviously that makes creating these scripts and maintaining them very easy and adds much to the appeal of scripting languages over compiled languages for system administrators. However, that presents an inherent security risk as any credentials you have to include in your scripts are open for anyone to see. Whether it is the user ID and password for your SQL server database, the WMI logon for your domain controller or something you just need to include in your script to make it work, anyone can open your script in notepad and see what the credentials are.

So if you have to write scripts that you provide for other users, that leave your workstation and contain even the least bit of sensitive information, use an executable packager to wrap your scripts encrypted in an exe file. There are several options available, but naturally we recommend the script packager found in PrimalScript, PrimalForms and the upcoming Visual PowerShell 2011.

Technorati Tags: ExecutionPolicy, powershell, security, VBScript, Windows Script Host

Since PrimalScript 2009 is a 32 bit application the host used is also of the 32 bit variety, residing in the System32 folder of your Windows directory.

If you are working on a 64 bit operating system and you have to use 64 bit COM objects you need to be able to run your scripts in 64 bit mode.

In order to do that you can simply change what specific version of CScript.exe is used by specifying the full path:

Go to Tools – Options – Environment – Languages and select VBScript. The default entry for the script engine just states “CScript.exe”. If you change that to C:\Windows\Sysnative\cscript.exe you get PrimalScipt to execute the 64 bit version. The “sysnative” substitute for system32 works on Vista, Windows 7 and Server 2008 operating system flavors.

If you don’t want to change the default behavior and just occasionally execute scripts in 64 bit mode, you can just leave the above mentioned setting alone and add the 64 bit engine to your Tools browser:

Right click anywhere in the tools browser and select “Customize…” and add a new tool in a group of your choice and add the settings as shown above. In order to run the current script in 64 bit mode you only have to click on the icon.

All these things work just as well for JScript if that is your language of choice, but don’t try this for PowerShell. PowerShell does not like to get its input and output streams redirected and will just hang if you try to do that. We will talk about 64 bit PowerShell in the next installment.

Technorati Tags: 64bit, JScript, powershell, PrimalScript, Server 2008, Sysnative, VBScript, Vista, windows 7

We were very happy to talk to with our users during the show. One of the questions we were asked was:

Why should I use PowerShell to create Windows Forms Applications?

There are a few reasons you might want to use PowerShell to create Windows Forms Applications:

1. Levy the power of PowerShell with the ease of a GUI interface.

2. It doesn’t require a developer to create a cool customized GUI application.

3. Limit the access of your users by providing predefined functionality. For example, you can create an application that only allows your user read access to a list of products in a Database, thus preventing the user from accidently “altering” any data. What you provide is what they have access to.

4. End users need not learn PowerShell nor will they be forced to use an intimidating command prompt.

5. There are no extra dependencies other then what is required to your run existing PowerShell scripts. You can create complete GUIs using nothing but PowerShell.

6. *Packaged Windows Form Applications support elevation and alternate credentials. Lets face it, you don’t want to give all your users administrative rights.

7. *Packaging your scripts will protect it by preventing access to the source code (script).

* Requires PrimalForms 2009 or PrimalScript 2009 to package scripts.

Technorati Tags: applications, gui, powershell, PrimalForms, PrimalScript, TechEd, Windows, Winforms

Please click here to participate: 2010 Backup Survey

Enter your email in the survey to win cool prizes.

Your responses will help determine what features get added and what gets cut from PrimalScript 2011 and Visual PowerShell 2011, so don’t hesitate.

Technorati Tags: Backup, PrimalScript, Survey, Version Control, Visual PowerShell

Our eBooks are currently distributed in a protected pdf format. What this means is that the eBook is imprinted with your email address at the bottom of each page when you download it. Here is a simple description of the process.

1. Purchase the eBook on www.ScriptingOutpost.com
2. You will receive a license key for the eBook
3. Register that license key at my.sapien.com
4. As soon as you register the eBook, a listing for that eBook will appear on the registration page. Below that listing is a link to download the eBook. Click on that link and the eBook will be imprinted and begin downloading to your computer.

It’s that simple!

We hope to start offering our eBooks in ePub format so that you can enjoy our books on devices like the Nook, Sony Reader and iPad. Those versions of the eBooks would be available on the specific device’s store.

Technorati Tags: Books, SAPIEN Press, SAPIENPress