Cerebrata.com: A community success story

(I’m several months behind in putting this out!)

A few months ago, Cerebrata had a public beta of their new released Azure cmdlets.  I came across the announcement on Twitter and fired it off to others who checked it out.

I had exchanged a few emails with their support when I discovered that something seemed to be odd/wrong when I tried to install their cmdlets on my 64-bit system.  They were very helpful in trying to determine the problem, and it was on my end.

But that was the thing that least impressed me actually…  They were very receptive of suggestions from Microsoft MVPs around their naming conventions.  There were a few unapproved verbs and also some pluralisms in their naming.  They were very quick to make changes to their code, or provide arguments why they felt their original approach was correct.

Thanks Guarav (from Cerebrata)!  By working together, we can try to make the PowerShell experience an awesome (and consistent) one for everyone.

Windows PowerShell Unleased 2nd Edition--AVAILABLE

I first blogged about the book HERE. Well, it is now "In Stock" on Amazon.com HERE.

Please feel free to leave comments on my blog or on Amazon. I welcome any/all feedback, and will use that feedback for a probably 3rd edition.

I enjoyed working with Tyson and Pete, and can appreciate now how much hard work it is to put your thoughts onto paper in a clear and concise way.

I hope that anyone that reads the book will find it a valuable reference.

DPM: Getting the installed DPM version

I found an interesting post in the microsoft.public.dataprotectionmanager newsgroup where it was asked if there was a way to tell what version of DPM was installed on a remote server.

Unfortunately, DPM doesn't provide a built-in cmdlet to accomplish this apparently, but a VBScript solution was provided using WMI. Of course, I had to provide a simple PowerShell solution:

PS>get-wmiobject -computername some_computer win32_product -filter "Name = 'Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007'"|select version

(I don't have a DPM environment to test, so maybe someone else can help to confirm that this works?)

So even though DPM doesn't provide this directly, we can obtain the info using the get-wmiobject cmdlet to do a WMI query.

Upcoming book: Microsoft SQL Server 2008

I recently wrapped up another authoring opportunity: I've contributed a chapter on the new PowerShell features in SQL Server 2008 for an upcoming book from SAMs: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration.

It's cool to start seeing PowerShell showing up just about everywhere in new Microsoft related books coming out from all the various publishers.

Current release date is set for November 10th, 2008.