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April 2006 Entries
Drumroll please… Monad is now PowerShell

It was an amazing honor for me to be able to represent both the Exchange 2007 and PowerShell 1.0 products today at MMS. Jeffrey has a great write up (thanks for the plug Jeffrey!) and so does Lee. Download, enjoy the new features and keep the great community going strong :) BTW: In no particular order, my new favorite features in the latest PowerShell RC0 drop:

  1. User customizable tab completion. Wow. Out of the box it works with parameters and variables. That means you can do: get-command - and it will complete the rest! I've customized my shell to complete directory names when "cd" or "set-location" are found on the cmdline (ala: programmatic completion)
  2. $? is more robust. This is really useful when interoperating with executables or simply working with a long sequence of commands in an interactive session 
  3. Cmdlet cleanup. There are a lot of renames which make more sense (invoke-command --> invoke-expression for example) and some output objects are now more aligned with their respective cmdlets. Read the release notes for full details.
  4. Command logging. This is a great feature for Exchange administrators--now every command executed in either GUI or cmdline can be logged! Its not on by default but you can turn it on by flipping a reg key.

There's lots of other goodies in there, really nice work Monad... er I mean PowerShell team! I'll write some more later on some of the other cool features--as they are best described with samples.

posted @ Tuesday, April 25, 2006 10:04 AM | Feedback (1)
Roundup: More “first reactions”, tutorials and some press

Well, until I can write more myself, I figured I'd share all the good content that is already being created by the community.

Press:

Windows IT Pro: Exchange 12 Shows Promise - "As noted previously, the new Exchange System Manager (ESM) GUI is completely redesigned and far less complicated than the current version... This is powerful stuff."

Infoworld: A First Look at Exchange 12 - "The new version’s scripting capability is going to be a favorite new feature among overworked IT managers."

InformIt: As Exchange 12 Looms, Microsoft Fixes Monad Bugs - The main issue in the article seems to be the upgrade from Beta 1 to Beta 2 (.Net versions are different). I believe Monad team has addressed this already.

Commentary:

ComputerZen.Com: Scott Hanselman: Loving Monad I mean Mush - Sweet article from a new user's prespective. I hope he has time to check out some of the upcoming features (actually I know for a fact that the new features will be awesome). Thanks for the link Scott!

Chris Dalby: "May I say thank you for making our lives easier.  Being at the bottom of the tree in Exchange has not always been an easy ride". You're welcome Chris!

Nick Gillott - "Managed by Monad. Call it what you will, this is a command line interface for playing with Exchange. Boy is it powerful."

Gerod Serafin - "The power a few short lines of code can possess never ceases to amaze me.  That is why I am really looking forward to Exchange 12 (We are still calling it that publicly, right?) and Monad."

Vlad Mazek - "Oooooh my god is this thing f'n awesome." You got that right.

Tutorials and Tips:

BrettJo - Nice snippet on getting started with scripting in E12. Some of the things like universal -whatif and -confirm support will be in the public Beta this summer.

Guy's Scripting Ezine - He's got some good new user tricks in this entry, and a convincing argument for learning about Monad (hint: Exchange!).

Enjoy, and don't forget to let me know if you have any questions while playing around with Monad and/or E12. Also, start sharing those scripts and one-liners, don't be shy :)  

posted @ Sunday, April 09, 2006 4:04 PM | Feedback (0)
News
A little slow these days as I'm busy working on exchangelabs.com. I will try and post tidbits when I get some time. Enjoy the older posts till then!
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