Here’s a list of many of the PowerShell MVPs and their blogs.  My list is not comprehensive but this one is.  Unfortunately, the Microsoft page doesn’t necessarily have the blogs unless the MVP happened to put that in their profile, and even then it’s a bit of clicking to find that out, so I thought I’d make this quick list.  Let’s call this list “beta”.  Eventually I’d like to have it on a wiki or other easily editable page and include other data like links to Twitter, and LinkedIn profile pages and so forth.

• /\/\o\/\/ – ThePowerShellGuy
• Brandon Shell on PoSH
• Charlie Russel - x(perts)64
• Daisuke Mutaguchi -Scripting Weblog (Japanese)
• Dmitry Sotnikov - PowerShell and beyond
• Don Jones - Concentrated Technology
• Doug Finke - Development in a Blink
• Gu Huajun - (Chinese)
• Guy Thomas
• Hal Rottenberg - TechProsaic
• Hiroki Takahashi - HIRO’s.NET (Japanese)
• Hiroshi Yoshioka - PowerShell Memo (Japanese)
• Jeffrey Hicks - Scripting Blog and More
• Karl Prosser - Live PowerShell
• Keith Hill’s Blog
• Kirk Munro - Poshoholic
• Marco Shaw - Get-PowershellBlog
• Max Trinidad - Florida PowerShell User Group
• Oisin Grehan - Nivot Ink
• Richard Siddaway’s Weblog
• Shay Levy - $cript Fanatic
• Sherif Talaat - The Arabian PowerShell (Arabic)
• Tobias Weltner - Dreaming in PowerShell
• Vadims Podans’s blog (Russian)
• Vasily Gusev - (Russian)
• Vinicius Canto - (Portuguese)
• Ying Li - PowerShell & System Center
• Arnaud Petitjean (French)

Please leave comments for updates to the list.

Update: I just added a ton of new links and changed some old ones.  It figures that Shay already had a list with everyone in it. 

I was working on my PowerShell profile today and I figured I would share it.  But let’s not stop there.  Why don’t you post yours as well, to your blog or this pastebin (add your link in the comments of this post), and we can learn from each other?

I’ll go first: http://posh.jaykul.com/p/2014

In case you are wondering why I am not using PoshCode.org, the reason is someone’s profile is not general purpose necessarily, and I think it might clutter the repository with stuff that does not make sense except for in the context of this blog post.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, and I wanted to apologize and let you all know what’s going on with me lately.  Lots of stuff has been going on actually, which is good and bad.  I like being busy, so that’s a good thing, but you know sometimes you just try to do too much stuff and then the stress kicks in and that’s not fun.

Anyway, here’s the rundown:

TechMentor

I’m presenting three sessions at TechMentor Orlando, and I’m excited about it.  I hope some of you happen to come down to the show this June, it should be a lot of fun.  I’ve been spending a lot of time getting my sessions ready and I hope that all goes well.  Here are the session names:

• W15 VMware ESXi for the Small Business and Smart IT Pro 
• W19 Automating VMware Management with Windows PowerShell
• TH8 Automate Hyper-V with PowerShell and Virtual Machine Manager

TechEd

You may know that as Director of PowerShellCommunity.org, I was sent to TechEd lsat week in Los Angeles. Steve Murawski and I spent our time alternating between staffing Microsoft’s management technologies booth, attending breakout sessions (and occasionally participating in them), meeting with PoshComm sponsors, meeting with prospective sponsors on the show floor, and just networking with other cool geeks who like PowerShell. If you use Facebook, check out the photos I tagged and captioned that Ibrahim (from the PowerShell team) took while at the show.

And there’s more! I was busy at the show…

I interviewed the one and only Mark Minasi for TechEd Online.  I don’t think it’s  been posted online yet, but when it is, I’ll be sure to give you all a link.  The guy is great to talk to and a hell of a speaker as most of you know already.  I had a lot of fun with the interview. In fact, it was funny because the lady coordinating the video shoot said to aim for 2-3 minutes, and Mark and I turned to look at each other and I knew he was thinking the exact same thing I was.  “This lady is crazy, let’s talk for as long as we want to.” 

I also interviewed Kirk Munro of PowerGUI fame, also for TechEd Online, but I think a different group.  This was a neat overview of what Kirk does.  Dmitry did a great write-up which you can find here.

One evening, I had the distinct honor of being interviewed by Scott Hanselman on his Hanselminutes podcast.  I knew that Scott’s show leaned heavy to the dev side, so I dragged Kirk along with me.  You can listen to us on show #162 PowerShell 2.0.

Let’s see what else…I had a book signing, got to meet a few people there.  I attended Don Jones’ PowerShell top 10 tips session, and we walked together to the bookstore and hung out while he was signing his own book.  I actually signed more copies of my book during his signing than my own.  Thanks, Don!

Last, but not least, my birds-of-a-feather session turned out great.  We had between 20 and 30 people, and it was a very interactive audience for which I was thankful.  Steve also helped out a lot during the talk.

Whew! Enough typing for now.  I need to get some more scripts posted up here.  I think that’ll start back up again now that I’ve got a new job and all that. (P.S. for those who may have missed it, I’m now at Home Depot on the Enterprise Monitoring team.)

If you follow me on Facebook you might know that I picked up a 2008 Mini Cooper a few weeks ago. Very fun car. And it has this huge flat top that is begging for some decoration. My first thought was of course–huge freaking Powershell logo!

Now, companies actually make vinyl body decals and sell them at dealerships for this purpose, but they are really expensive. $450 and up. I know a guy who does signs, and who actually has a Mini with adverts for his company plastered all over it. I thought to ask and turns out he is willing to make me a deal.

Now we come to the question:

If I were to have a bunch of these things made, would any of you guys and gals buy one? I can’t afford to give them away like /n software does with their sticker, and these aren’t paper, but long lasting (and removable) vinyl. I was going to do them in two sizes: 10 in. and 2 ft. Small would run $25 and large would be $40.

Any takers?

For those of you who are going to TechEd this year in LA, I’d like to invite you to the Birds of a Feather session: "Practical PowerShell: Best Practices from the Field"
Date: Wednesday, 5/13/2009 at 8:00PM-9:00PM
Location: room TBA (check online session builder)
Description:

This session will encourage attendees to share their stories and best practices about using PowerShell to automate their IT operations. The moderator will also share his favorite tips and tricks, as well as to show people where they can find the best resources to help save their time and money. All levels of expertise welcome.

Also joining us will be special guest Ed Wilson from Microsoft. Ed is the Scripting Guy at the TechNet Script Center and author of Microsoft Windows PowerShell Step by Step.

I am very pleased to announce that my book, Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell: TFM is now available to pre-order for $41.99 at SAPIEN’s ScriptingOutput site. Estimated ship date is mid-April. [See update at end about availability at other e-tailers and shipping prices.]

Here’s what the book is about:

VMware is the king when it comes to virtualization. Windows PowerShell has gotten huge accolades as an extremely powerful tool for automation of IT tasks. These two technologies make a lot of sense together, and VMware is now making that happen with the release of their VI Toolkit for Windows.

In “Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell”, you will learn how to perform everything from simple ad-hoc reporting at the command-line (”are any of my virtual machines powered off?”) to complex scripts to automate a massive deployment of hundreds of virtual machines. Simple, yet powerful; concise, yet robust; you will enjoy using this new language to solve your old problems using less code than you thought possible.

If you are a system administrator responsible for managing a VMware Virtual Infrastructure (version 2.0 or above), or a standalone ESX Server (version 3.0 or above), then you need this book. Aimed at scripters of every level, the book starts off with a PowerShell primer and continues well into the internals of virtualization on the VMware platform.

Table of Contents

• Introduction - Why You Need This Book

1. Windows PowerShell Crash Course
2. Getting Started
3. Scripting with Virtual Infrastructure
4. Inventory and Reporting
5. Deployment and Configuration
6. Maintenance and Operations
7. Troubleshooting and Problem Resolution
8. Managing VMWare with PowerGUI

I have two pieces of cool news on my book, Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell: TFM. First, it should be going to print around April 15th! I think it’ll be available on pre-order before then, but I don’t know precisely when that will happen. Second, VMware has partnered with my publisher to make a 10% off coupon available to ISVs and IHVs. If you are currently on VMware’s TAP mailing list, look for that coupon to arrive in the March newsletter which should be in your inbox now.

One of our fans of the PowerScripting Podcast, Sean Kearney, aka ye110wbeard has produced a theme song for the show. It’s sung to the tune of “Panama”, by Van Halen, and he did a great job.  Apparently, he downloaded all of the episodes in order to come up with clips he could insert into the song.  I love the part where I introduce “the Dread Pirate Ed Wilson” 

Please go check out Sean’s podcast (full of other silly songs) and his blog. This guy is crazy, but in a good way.

Here are some of my other favorites of his:

• PowerShell Wizard
• The “Dead Cisco Sketch”

Gmail can now import and export filters as XML. This script will read in an XML file generated by Gmail (the Path parameter), and create from it a flat PSObject with Id, Updated, Name and Value fields. Since it is flat, you must use the Id field to correlate the filter criteria and actions. As far as I can tell, the first item in a filter is the criterion, and any subsequent ones describe the action to take. More info about filter import/export can be found here.

TODO:

• script the actual export of filters from gmail, removing need for working with the file at all 
• display in a treeview to better visualize the multiple items in each entry Out-GridView does this nicely

The script:

Oisin gave me this technique, so I thought I’d share with you all after doing some tweak to the script.  It’s not done, and I haven’t yet found my style on the V2 CTP3 advanced function parameters, so pardon the mess.

The code:

And here’s a dialog box in action.  You’ve seen these before, I’m sure.