We received a lot of session proposals for the PowerShell Deep Dive conference. Thank you to everyone who sent one or more in.

I wanted to share the abstracts for a handful of the sessions that have already been selected. Stay tuned, details on more sessions will be available soon…

Defining domain-specific vocabularies using Windows PowerShell
Speaker: Kirk Munro

PowerShell was built from the ground up to be a rich, extendible scripting language. While it is of paramount importance to keep commands you add to PowerShell consistent with the rest of the scripting language, there are domains where great elegance and simplicity can be achieved by stepping away from this model and creating domain-specific vocabularies instead.

  • What is a domain-specific vocabulary and how is it an important extension point for Windows PowerShell?
  • What domain-specific vocabularies come with PowerShell?
  • What are some examples of domain-specific vocabularies that can add great value to PowerShell?
  • How do you go about creating a domain-specific vocabulary?
  • How do you create a domain-specific vocabulary of commands while maintaining consistency with the rest of PowerShell commands?

Come to this session and join PowerShell MVP Kirk Munro in a discussion about the use of domain-specific vocabularies in PowerShell, where you will learn the answers to these questions and more.

Mastering Format and Type Extensions
Speaker: Jeffrey Hicks

Windows PowerShell is designed with administrators in mind. The goal is to present the most useful information to you with the least amount of effort. But sometimes you need something out of the box. Do you have a preferred way to view process objects that requires scripting every time? Does your script create a custom object that you would like formatted in a specific manner?

This session will explain PowerShell's formatting system and how to master it with your own formatting and type extension files, including how to incorporate these files into your scripts and modules.

WMI Gotchas and Hidden Gems
Speaker: Richard Siddaway

WMI has been around for a long time in the Windows environment. It has a reputation for being very powerful but very difficult. PowerShell has changed this to a certain degree by making it easier to use, however it is still relatively undocumented. PowerShell opens up WMI in a number of ways but introduces a number of “gotchas”.

A number of key questions will be answered during this session:

  • Is Invoke-WmiMethod always the answer?
  • How can I change WMI information?
  • How does WMI authentication and authorization work?
  • Should I use explicit remoting, implicit remoting or WMI?
  • WMI overlaps with some Cmdlets e.g. Get-Process and Win32_Process – which should I use when?
  • How do I get the best of WQL? Do I use queries or filters?

The PowerShell Library for Hyper-V: how was built, how it is used.
Speaker: James O’Neill

The “PSHyperV” PowerShell library has had over 40,000 downloads from Codeplex.com (with another 25,000 downloads of the documentation). With 120 functions and over 5,000 lines of PowerShell, 600 lines of formatting XML and a megabyte of on-line help it is one of the biggest PowerShell community projects as well as one of the most popular.

This session will look at the lessons learnt on the project, the WMI techniques used in building the library, how the monolithic V1 was broken into manageable pieces, how functions were designed to be supportive to users and prevent them from accidentally doing damage and it will show the library in use managing HyperV.

 

 

Travis Jones [MSFT]
Program Manager
Microsoft Corporation