Powershell, DPM and Virtualisation – some great blogs…

Powershell

Explore Your [Environment] on the Windows Powershell blog, written by Jeff Snover.  The article takes a bit of reading but has a great walk through of using Powershell to invoke the System.Environment .Net class.  For example:

“ [Datetime]::Today
Saturday, December 13, 2008 12:00:00 AM”

And:

“foreach ($f in [Enum]::GetValues([System.Environment+SpecialFolder])) {"{0,-20} - {1}" -f $f, [Environment]::GetFolderPath($f) }
Desktop - C:\Users\jsnover\Desktop
StartMenu - C:\Users\jsnover\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\S
tart Menu
DesktopDirectory - C:\Users\jsnover\Desktop
ProgramFiles - C:\Program Files
etc…”

..but don’t just steal these lines.  You need to read the whole article to put all the pieces together.  (..and you also need to read this one (What the Heck is an ENUM?) to follow it up.

Really useful if you are verifying your configuration using DCM.

DPM

The DPM product group need your help in reviewing the beta IPD Guide - Now available for download - Infrastructure Planning & Design (IPD) guide for DPM 2007 SP1

Virtualisation

Mark Russinovich on virtualization, Sysinternals and the cloud  on TechTarget.com:

“In this interview from Microsoft Tech-Ed EMEA 2008 in Barcelona, author and Microsoft technical fellow Mark Russinovich sits down with SearchWinIT.com senior news director Margie Semilof to discuss several topics that are on the horizon for Windows administrators, such as cloud computing, client virtualization, and the release of Windows 7 Server. He also provides insight on the fate of WinFS, what's new with Sysinternals and the controversy surrounding Windows Vista.”