Get-Scripting Episode 16 with Hey Scripting Guy Ed Wilson

One of the great things about producing a podcast is that you get to talk to and sometimes meet really interesting people. On the latest epsiode of the Get-Scripting podcast we were lucky enough to talk to Ed Wilson, the Scripting Guy over at Microsoft. I’ve often used and learnt loads from the Hey Scripting Guy series so it was great to talk to the guy who is currently writing them.

We talked about Scripting Best Practises, the upcoming 2010 Scripting Games and Scripting Guy Regeneration. We also found out where that amazing accent comes from

Tune in and check it out for yourself.

Get-Scripting Episode 14 – Clash of the Titans

One of the things I most enjoy about Christmas Day is after all the chaos of the morning has died down and everyone has fallen asleep after their big lunch I would tune it to Talksport and listen to their pre-recorded Clash of the Titans show whilst working through the mountain of washing up.

This show would pit together four of their most expressive presenters in a 3 hour debate about topics of current issue or that which had been significant during the year. It is always a great listen to hear their opinions and as they struggle to get a word in edgeways with the other presenters who are just as full of opinions and great stories.

For Episode 14 I decided to put together something similar and invited Thomas Lee, James O’Neill and Richard Siddaway to join a panel discussion to talk about PowerShell 2.0. Unfortunately Richard couldn’t make it at the last minute, but we still had a great discussion – you can listen to it here.

Now I can start thinking about next year’s Clash of the Titans, maybe I should include George Galloway just to see the sparks fly.

Guest Co-Host Appearance on the PowerScripting Podcast

When I got into PowerShell a couple of years back one of the first resources I discovered was the PowerScripting podcast, at the time just featuring Jonathan Walz (later to be joined by Hal Rottenberg). It was great to find some other people just as enthusiastic about this new technology as I was and also a really good learning tool with loads of resources for getting started. I think I caught up with about the first 20 episodes during a single month and my wife was forever asking me why I was always listening to “those two American guys again….” in the kitchen.

They were the inspiration for starting my own show the Get-Scripting podcast and were good enough to give me some tips and advice on getting started. We’ve developed a great relationship with the guys since then and they’ve been particularly helpful in assisting with interviewees for our show, like putting us in touch with Jeffrey Snover for the panel discussion at Teched last year and the most recent episode with Antoine Habert of Poshboard fame.

So last week it was my great pleasure to be asked at the last minute to fill in for Hal as a guest co-host on the show when he couldn’t make it. I had a great time recording it with Jonathan Walz and you can check it out here.

Get-Scripting Podcast Number 12

So we recently published the latest episode of the Get-Scripting podcast and had a lot of fun talking with Carter Shanklin, the product manager over at VMware for PowerCLI – which for the uninitiated is the PowerShell toolkit for managing your ESX environment. Possibly the most interesting output from the interview was the upcoming Project Onyx. By sounds of things it a graphical tool which generates the PowerShell script for the action you just carried out in the VI client – similar to how Exchange 2007 provides the script at the end of most of the GUI wizards.

Podcast number 12 (actually the 13th episode since we started at Episode 0) took us past the 1 year mark for the podcast. It’s been a great experience having met and spoken with some really interesting and smart people, and with PowerShell being adpoted in ever more places we won’t be short of content to output over the coming year.

Get-Scripting Episode 11 with /\/\o\/\/ aka the PowerShell Guy

Everybody in the PowerShell knows /\/\o\/\/ aka the PowerShell Guy, aka Marc Van Orsouw. Either you have used one of his tools like Powertab or WMI Explorer, he’s answered one of your forum postings or you’ve read one of his blog posts to find some information about PowerShell or solve a problem. He is also crazy fun to be around, he had me in tears of laughter back at the PowerShell community dinner in Barcelona last year mainly because he instigated this which happened at the next morning’s PowerShell session with Jeffrey Snover.

One of the best things about podcasting is that you get to talk to some really interesting people, Alan and I had great fun chatting with /\/\o\/\/ recently and I hope you will enjoy listening to it – you can download the latest episode here.

(Apologies if you can hear birds tweeting in the background during the interview – it was a rare hot day in the UK and I had the window open in the room I was recording in and didn’t realise that my microphone was so sensitive that it would pick up such quiet noises from outside.)

Get-Scripting Episode 10 with Shay Levy

One of the most interesting aspects and main reasons I started the podcasting was the opportunity to meet and speak with interesting people. Within the PowerShell community there are lots of people highly enthusiastic about this particular area of technology.

Recently Alan Renouf and I were able to talk with Shay Levy (unfortunately we couldn’t meet him since we live in different countries) who is one of the most active members of the PowerShell community. If you’ve ever posted a question to a PowerShell based forum (e.g. the official newsgroup, PowerShellCommunity.org, PowerGUi.org etc….) its more than likely he will have answered one of your questions at some point.

We had great fun chatting with Shay, finding more out about himself (including how you really pronounce his name) and some of the other contributions he has published aside from his million plus forum replies.

You can check it out here.

Get-Scripting Podcast Episode 9 with Scott Herold

On the Get-Scripting Podcast we recently caught up with Scott Herold from Quest / Vizioncore whom Alan had attempted to record an interview with at the recent VMWorld conference, but unfortunately (or fortunately depending on which way you look at it) they ran out of time because Scott spent so much time demoing his new project the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative since it was proving incredibly popular.

So when they both got home we hooked up over Skype and had a lot of fun recording the interview that way instead. It sounded like a really interesting tool and the initial release has now been made public so I’d definitely recommend you go check it out. Currently it supports the VMWare hypervisor technology, but there are plans to expand this for Hyper-V and other areas too so it could well become your tool of choice for managing virtual environments and guess what – its free! In fact Get-Scripting’s very own Alan Renouf even contributed some of the reporting code so it must be good.

Scott was also on the Powerscripting Podcast last week so there is more for you to find out from Hal and Jonathan’s questions for him too.

Get-Scripting Podcast Episode 6

So we got Episode 6 of the Get-Scripting Podcast out last week. You can get it from here:

Download it here, subscribe in iTunes or via a different feed reader

Normally Alan, Matt and I all arrange to be in the same place to record the show. Given we live in completely different places in the UK this is not easy and is probably the main reason we keep it to one show per month. We could do a Skype type thing, but we prefer to keep it a face-to-face recording. Now though that I work in the same office as Alan this time we took the opportunity to record the show during a lunchtime and I got Matt to post-edit the result when meeting for family time over Christmas.

End result: I think the show was a bit more relaxed because we just let the tape roll and edited afterwards rather than stopping and starting when normally we sometimes re-record bits; logistically much easier; still took about the same time to edit.

The interview with Ben Pearce which I had recorded a few weeks earlier was an absolute blast. Ben is such a fun guy to be around and made for a real easy interview because he doesn’t stop talking; I think we got some great tips from him for Powershell beginners too.

PowerScripting Live CTP3 Special – Thursday 18th Dec

This is a must watch PowerScripting Podcast special – the hint is in the title.

Jeffrey Snover and Bruce Payette are the two guests, it should be an awesome show.

Thursday 18th Dec 9pm EST, which translates to 2am UK time. I think I’m going to have to stay up for it!

Get-Scripting Podcast Episode 5 – (Dmitry Sotnikov – Quest AD cmdlets and PowerGUI)

We had a lot of fun recording the latest episode of the Get-Scripting podcast on Tuesday night. Its been great having Alan join the show, gives the show a much more conversational feel plus I don’t have to come up with all the content.

We had a really interesting interview in this episode with Dmitry Sotnikov talking about the Quest AD cmdlets and PowerGUI – go check it out.

Coming up on the next show in December we have an interview with Ben Pearce from Microsoft. Ben is the guy who recently presented Powershell sessions with Jeffrey Snover at TechEd EMEA, does a lot of Powershell training and is great fun to interview.