Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Sometimes When You Ask – You Get! Thanks Azure!

Over the past few months, I've been running a set of 1-day sessions for Microsoft SMB partners – these sessions are a combination of lecture and lab work. This material shows them how to position key Azure and Windows Server 2012 R2 features and gives them experience in using the products.

In a recent session, I was asked about Azure Backup and client systems. At that point (early September this year), the answer was no – Azure Backup did not support Windows 8 (or any client problem). The scenario here is the road warrior who never got back to base, but was forever somewhere in the cloud (via whatever networking they may find in their travels!). They just want their data backed up so if the laptop dies, is stolen or the disk itself dies – they can recover their data once the replacement hardware is up and running fully. Seemed to me to be a service I might buy for myself!

This seemed to me to worthy of consideration. So I posted a request over on Feedback.Azure.com. A couple of days later, I got surprise email from the Azure  Backup PM who wanted to chat with me about the suggestion I'd posted. We then had a conference call and I was able to explain the user need, and the potential for the suggestion. He listened, asked great questions then hinted that this is something they could consider for a future release. I did not hold out much hope of features any time soon, but it was nice to be listened to and to maybe having an impact down the road.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I read today's post on the Azure Team Blog, which announced support for Windows Cliewnt OS's! From asking to delivery in 14 weeks. Nice job!

Sunday, December 07, 2014

Type Accelerators and TypePx

Last week, I updated some earlier scripts related to Type Accelerators over on my PshScripts blog – and I've had some great feedback. Kirk Munro (@Poshoholic on twitter and all around PowerShell superstar) pointed out there is a TypePX module he's published to GitHub.

As to be expected of anything Kirk touches, the TypePX module is rich and well implemented. His module is production ready – so you could easily copy it to your modules folder and start to use it. The TypePx functions are pipeline friendly and have good error handling. 

What I've published is much more simple and designed for a different audience. The whole idea of what I published, and indeed the whole point of my PshScripts blog, is to illustrate simple concepts, apis, etc in a simple script. In this case, the essence of type accelerators is wrapped up in a few lines of code. This is what I strive to publish in Pshscripts – showing you how to do one thning simply (per script!). What Kirk publishes is enterprise grade production scripting. I readily admit they are different – but I'd like to think there is room for both. One ofr learning with, one for using in production.

Saturday, December 06, 2014

Type Accelerators – And a Module

Over the years, I've written about type accelerators and PowerShell. A type accelerator is simply a synthetic type name that you can create to serve as an alias to another type name. For example, you could use the int16 type to refer to the System.Int16, or guid instead of [system.guid]. Type accelerators are meant to simplify handling of types by IT Pros in PowerShell scripts.

TAs were first introduced in a beta of PowerShell V2, and I posted code that worked (then). However, I have been recently updating my script library blog (http://pshscripts.blogspot.com), I discovered that TAs stopped working that way. After some fun and effort, I've now found hot how they work today, and how you can play with them!

TAs work by just providing you with an alias to a full type name. To some degree, TAs make up for the lack of a Using statement such as in the C# language. Some common TAs in use include [ADSI], [WMI], [String], [regex] and many more.

This week, I have published a new TypeAccelerators modules. This module contains scripts that define 4 TA-related functions:

  • Get-TypeAccelerator– this gets the TAs active in your current PowerShell Session. This function also takes a parameter (AliasRE) which is a regular expression over the type accelerators to return.
  • Measure-TypeAccelerator – this just returns a count of the TAs active.
  • New-TypeAccelerator – this adds a new type accelerator that aliases an existing type
  • Remove-TypeAccelerator – this removes a type accelerator from your current system.

Here's a screen shot of using these TAs

 image

The scripts also create aliases for these functions: GTA, CTA, NTA and RTA as you might imagine. The module also includes an about_ file for help – you get this importing the module!

You can get the module at http://www.reskit.net/powershell/typeacceleratosr.zip. I will also look to publish this module to the new PowerShell V5 Internet module repository (and maybe Chocolatey too if I get time).

A small footnote: this module and the scripts therein are intended to illustrate the concepts around type accelerators. They lack any sort of pipeline friendliness or error handling. So if you decide to make use of the concepts here – make sure you add the production quality aspects to your code, leveraging mine.

Thursday, December 04, 2014

Azure Documentation on GitHub

Late last night, I was looking for some information on a topic within Azure. After a search, I ended up here: a good page describing Azure cloud services. As I read through it, I noticed that at the bottom there was this link

image 

The highlighting is mine, but I looked at this for a bit before the import sunk in: MS is open sourcing the Azure documentation! WOW!!

So I went off to GItHub (in this case to https://github.com/Azure/azure-content/blob/master/articles/cloud-services-what-is.md) to have a look. From here, if you create a GitHub id, you can create a fork, edit one (or more documents) and submit them back via a pull request. Once approved the documentation goes live.

What a cool idea – well done Microsoft.

Monday, December 01, 2014

What is Coming in the Next Version of Hyper-V?

Savision have just sent mail about an upcoming web cast on this topic. On Dec 2 and Dec 4, Symon Perriman (Microsoft Senior Technical Evangelist) will co-host (with Savision) that will cover an overview of the new capabilities coming in the next Version of Hyper-V. I can't wait!

Mark your calendar for these dates:
Tuesday, December 2, 2014 | 3:30 PM CET/ 9:30 AM EDT   
Thursday, December 4, 2014 | 8:00 PM CET/ 2:00 PM EDT 

Register now for these exclusive webinars by Microsoft's Symon Perriman as there is limited space available.