Community developer blogs

Thomas Lee

Recent Posts

• Bing is making a spash!

  Posted: 07 Jun 2009 at 08:31 by Thomas

  In more ways than one! By Bing, I mean Microsoft’s new search engine ( or ). I’ve been playing with it a little (and love the nice scenery pictures on the landing page). The results seem OK so far, but it seems a lot better than the old Live Search engine. And there are a lot of references to Wikipedia. One interesting thing though, I’m starting to see referrals in my blog hits. Looking at the most recent 20 hits, 5 are from Bing.com!

• Useful Yet Little Known Features in PowerShell

  Posted: 24 May 2009 at 10:46 by Thomas

  Over on the Stack Overflow site, there’s a fascinating question and answer(s) about little known features of PowerShell. See What are some of the most useful yet little known features in the PowerShell language for this article. If you are a PowerShell geek, you probably know these, but there are one or two that you might have missed! Technorati Tags: PowerShell,advanced

• TechNet Virtual Conference 2009

  Posted: 23 May 2009 at 09:18 by Thomas

  Where are you going to be on June 19th? If you are a techie and into Microsoft technology, then perhaps you should be attending TechNet’s free Online Conference. This is an all day, free, on-line event aimed at delivering technical information that the community requested. And did I mention, unlike other events you have to pay for, this conference is free! The conference is divided up into two tracks: Technology and IT Manager, with content to match.

• PowerShell and WMI Namespaces

  Posted: 22 May 2009 at 15:00 by Thomas

  Over on Tim Benninghoff blog – he has an interesting post:: PowerShell and WMI namespaces. With WMI, the classes and intances are organised under a hierarchal namespace starting at the appropriately named “root”.  Individual nodes can have children which can in turn have children and so on. To some degree, namespaces are just defined by a product team and there is little consistency across software products (such is life!). But where to start?

• Windows Vista for XP Professionals

  Posted: 21 May 2009 at 15:53 by Thomas

  I’ve been carrying this book (see to buy this book!) . It’s written by Dutch MCT superstar Raymond Comvalius. In summary, this is a great book – simple  and to the point. Unlike some books, there’s very few screen shots – just lots of good straightforward text! The book contains 8 chapters: Chapter 1 – Introduction Chapter 2 – What’s new in Vista and is not discused in the book – a nice touch!

• Pscx 1.2 Beta Released

  Posted: 20 May 2009 at 11:07 by Thomas

  The beta of the next version of the PowerShell Community extensions has been released (see Nivot Ink - Pscx 1.2 Beta Released for more details). The code itself can be downloaded from: . For me, the cool thing is that this is released as a module so I can import the module when I want it – or not. Nice touch. If you are using Win 7, note this beta requires Win 7 RC! Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Powershell Community Extensions

• 2009 Summer Scripting Games

  Posted: 19 May 2009 at 10:04 by Thomas

  As in years past, Microsoft is hosting the 2009 Summer Scripting Games. This year, the games are co-promoted by The Microsoft Script Guys and PosCode.Org. The games will run from June 15-26 and should be a lot of fun. As happened last year, I’ve been asked to submit a sample script and am hard at work on it already! If you are a novice, an expert, or anywhere inbetween with scripting (PowerShell or even VB Script) then visit the site, sign-up and take part.

• Windows Management Infrastructure Blog

  Posted: 24 Apr 2009 at 09:03 by Thomas

  The WMI team are now blogging in the Windows Management Infrastructure Blog. A most useful blog for those wanting to understand WMI (and BITS, and WINRM) especially those coming to this from a PowerShell point of view. One interesting post examines the WMI story, pre Windows 7 (with lots of great links to more background). Another post looks at what is coming with WMI in Windows 7 (i.e. with PowerShell V2). This blog is well written! And any blog that can mix PowerShell, reindeers, Jedis, ands a

• PowerShell and CMDlet design guidelines.

  Posted: 23 Apr 2009 at 23:32 by Thomas

  Dan Harman, a PM in the Windows PowerShell team has published an excellent blog article: Increasing visibility of cmdlet design guidelines. The article talks about cmdlet naming conventions and the importance of good naming around the verbs and nouns used in the names of cmdlets (and by implication advanced functions too). The article also talks about the problems of a proliferation of uses of PowerShell that deviate from the standards currently being set by the PowerShell team. With the increas

• Saying Thanks

  Posted: 22 Apr 2009 at 15:40 by Thomas

  I’ve been posting here to this blog for a few years – and on occasion, I get a nice comment either here on the blog or in email. In September 2006, I published an article entitled Vista Shortcut keys where I described the new short cut keys you can use with Vista.  Well today, I got a comment on the blog – it wasn’t much, just a short “thanks” but it sure made my day! Technorati Tags: Thanks

• Hey Scripting Guy! Windows Powershell and Pipelining

  Posted: 22 Apr 2009 at 11:55 by Thomas

  Just saw a new article from The Scripting Guys (aka  Ed Wilson and Craig Liebendorfer). Entitled “Hey Scripting Guy! Windows Powershell and Pipelining”, this article looks at the PowerShell pipeline. It’s a 100-200 level article, but may be helpful to learn more about the pipeline.This article is one of many that The Scripting Guys pump out – for a complete list, by date, see: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/all.mspx. There are 18 articles already for April. The Sc

• PowerShellASP - Build dynamic web content with PowerShell!

  Posted: 21 Apr 2009 at 19:29 by Thomas

  This is pretty cool – integration of ASP.NET and PowerShell.  PowerShellASP is an ASP-like template language for Web Applications. You create templates that contain a mixture of mark-up i.e. (HTML, XML or whatever) plus inline PowerShell code. At runtime, your templates/pages are translated to PowerShell code and executed as a single unit inside a PowerShell pipeline. The results are then sent to the client browser. Setting it up is easy too: see http://www.powershelltoys.com/configuration

• Fun and Games with WMI and PowerShell

  Posted: 21 Apr 2009 at 19:04 by Thomas

  As I continue to dive deeper into PowerShell WMI, I continue to be surprised by new things I discover. I’ve been playing today with the WMI Class WIN32_printer. Sometime ago, I posted a code sample over on MSDN using this class with Powershell (see the original sample here). The original sample produced a test page on a specific printer – but I thought it would be interesting to see what happened if I ran the script against ALL the printers define on my workstation. And that got interesting. On

• Master-PowerShell by Dr. Tobias Weltner

  Posted: 15 Apr 2009 at 11:00 by Thomas

  As a PowerShell addict, I love sharing information about the product. I’ve just seen that Dr Tobias Weltner has finished off an e-book, entitled Master-PowerShell. This book is a free, 20-chapter work covering all aspects of PowerShell and is targeted at PowerShell Version 1. Thus, no details on Modules, remoting, etc, but nevertheless containing lots of useful information. I especially enjoyed reading Chapter 18 and learning more about PowerShell and WMI! I recommend this book! Technorati Tags

• Rich Copy – A Must Have Application

  Posted: 14 Apr 2009 at 13:00 by Thomas

  A very long time ago, when I was contracting for Microsoft, I got a copy of a cool internal application called Rich Copy – sort of a RoboCopy on steroids. The Internally obtained version of Rich Copy timed out after a while which was a shame.But today, I’ve just read that Rich Copy is available for download from the TechNet site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx. This is a very seriously cool app – and it’s free and freely available. Technorati Tags: Rich

• Microsoft Office Protocol Documents – Geek Heaven

  Posted: 13 Apr 2009 at 11:08 by Thomas

  I’m just back to the UK after a month on the road, topped off by a week in Redmond attending an OCS Voice Ignite Train-The-Trainer session. Last week was a week in geek heaven. We spent a lot of time exploring the inner workings of OCS. In particular, how OCS operates on the wire – both between servers and between client and server. Fascinating stuff – sheer geek bliss. Both last week and in my Voice Ignite classes, I see huge interest around how MS has implemented SIP on the Wire within OCS.  W

• Microsoft accepts defeat to Wikipedia and kills off Encarta

  Posted: 01 Apr 2009 at 11:08 by Thomas

  Today’s news that Microsoft accepts defeat to Wikipedia and kills off Encarta, which I read in the on-line version of The Times, is quite sad. But it’s one data point in the huge shift we’re seeing from the older style printed material (and that includes CD/DVDs) to online only. We’ve seen a number of newspapers stop publishing their print editions, and a magazine I wrote for (Server Management Magazine), I contributed for over 10 years, has also gone web only. Although Encarta was an on-line p

• Server Management Magazine- $50 off Idera’s PowerShell Plus deal

  Posted: 05 Mar 2009 at 15:03 by Thomas

  I write for Server Management magazine – and over on their web site, there’s a cool offer on PowerShell Plus. For a limited time, Server Management web site readers can take advantage of the offer of $50 off PowerShell Plus, thanks to those very nice people at Idea.  With this offer you can download the current version OR the latest beta from the Idera website. You don’t need not wait until the new version comes out to purchase.  If you like what you see in the beta, you can purchase the c

• SLMgr Commands and Options

  Posted: 25 Feb 2009 at 20:09 by Thomas

  I’ve been dealing a lot lately with activation of Server 2008. It’s not been as easy as I’d like. In searching for some help, I came across a great article on SLMgr: SLMgr Commands and Options with Windows Vista Product Key Activation. This article provides a good look at the options with this SLMgr.ext tool. Technorati Tags: SLMgr.exe

• OCS, WMI and PowerShell

  Posted: 24 Feb 2009 at 10:07 by Thomas

  This past week, I was teaching OCS Voice Ignite in Munich and a colleague (superstar Robin Edwards). During the week, we chatted about how to configure OCS’s Address Book service. This is a topic that comes up a lot in our OCS training, especially as the Address Book seems to be one of the key troubleshooting issues our delegates encounter. As it turns out, you cannot do much with the GUI. There’s nothing there to enable you to do much more than view SOME of the settings. For example, by d