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Don Jones

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Don Jones avatar

Don Jones

370 articles  •  5 podcast episodes

2 min read

PowerShell Great Debate: To Accelerate, or Not?

At his Birds of a feather session at TechEd 2013, Glenn Sizemore and I briefly debated something that I’d like to make the topic of today’s Great Debate. It has to do with how you create new, custom objects. For example, one approach - which I used to favor, but now think is too …

2 min read

Pipeline or Script? That is the Question

When I teach PowerShell classes, I often start by assuring students that, with the shell, you can _accomplish a great deal without ever writing a script. _And it’s true - you can. Unlike predecessor technologies like VBScript, PowerShell lets you pack a lot of goodness into a one-liner - or …

2 min read

PowerShell Great Debate: Capturing Errors

Hot on the heels of our last Great Debate, let’s take the discussion to the next logical step and talk about how you like to capture errors when they occur. The first technique is to use -ErrorVariable: `Try { Get-WmiObject Win32_BIOS -comp nothing -ea stop -ev mine } Catch { use $mine for …

2 min read

PowerShell Great Debate: Error Trapping

In the aftermath of The Scripting Games, it’s clear we need to have several community discussions - thus, I present to you, The Great Debates. These will be a series of posts wherein I’ll outline the basic situation, and you’re encouraged to debate and discuss in the comments …

1 min read

Overall Winners of the Scripting Games

**Congratulations to our top winners, **determined by our expert judges (and in this case we also considered their CrowdScores), mikefrobbins and taygibb, who have just won a free pass to Microsoft TechEd Europe or Microsoft TechEd North America 2014. Instructions are in your profile for claiming …

2 min read

Scripting Games Event 6 Winners

We’re pleased to announce the winners for Event 6 of The Scripting Games 2013! Winners: You can log into The Scripting Games Web site and go to your Profile page to see your prize. You will be given a prize redemption code and either a URL where you can redeem it, or an e-mail address of the …

2 min read

Call for Debates!

As the Scripting Games begin to wind down, I know that we’ve come across a number of divergent opinions, especially in the comments. “You shouldn’t use .NET classes!” says one comment, “you should have done this with a .NET class” says another comment _in the same …

4 min read

More PowerShell v4 and DSC Details

Here’s what I know, much based on a TechEd talk this week: We can expect PowerShell v4 to ship in the Windows Management Framework, as with previous versions. It will be preinstalled on Windows Server 2012 R2 and what they’re calling Windows 8.1; the default execution policy will be …