First Post!
I just wanted to start off with a quick intro and to briefly go over my intentions here. First off, I’m very glad you found the site and are reading this; now it is my job to keep you coming back! If you have any interest in Vista I hope to make that an easy decision for you:
Microsoft marketing boasts, “over 400 new features” in Windows Vista. I’ve been digging into Vista for quite some time now and I really don’t think they are exaggerating at all. Vista is full of changes on the surface and under the hood. As someone who spends a scary amount of time in Windows these changes are particularly exciting. Not change for the sake of change, but in that about every change I see I find myself turning to the person near me (whether they care or not) and filling them in on how cool I think it is. At least to start with, that is pretty much what I want to do here—there are tons of great new features and ways to do business in Vista and I’m excited to have this platform to share them with you.
I have an admin background so, while I’ll definitely spend time discussing the cool stuff, I also want to spend a lot of time on the technical side of Vista and how it can be administered. I run AppDeploy.com which is a community focused on deployment, was an author on the Microsoft Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) team and wrote a free book on Desktop Administration. As the deployment of applications (and naturally Vista itself) results in more changes for the way Administrators work, it will definitely be a topic getting some attention here. I also produce a suite of Scripting tools at AdminScriptEditor.com, authored a book on Scripting with KiXtart and write a scripting column at MCPmag.com. With that background, I really won’t be able to help but talk about PowerShell and the great things you can do in Vista from the command line.
I hope these things are half as interesting to you as they are to me! If so, I’m glad you made it here. The site will be updated with new posts regularly and I will soon be producing podcasts as well. Please subscribe using your favorite RSS reader to stay on top of the latest and come back soon!
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Comments
I'd love to hear about any things you think we missed or should do better. I didn't drill into KiXtart so your input would be very valuable.
Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows PowerShell/MMC Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
Posted by: Jeffrey Snover | December 2, 2006 11:45 AM
Thanks you for being the very first to comment here Jeffery! The toughest thing about PS is that it is intimidating at first and takes a while to grow comfortable with. Conversely, KiXtart is a very simple and intuitive language with functions focused on the task of logon script processing (though obviously capable of more). I have not seen an example of PS as a logon processor yet, but I'm sure it will come. Perhaps overkill for the task, I expect when it becomes the preferred language of enough administrators, they will just begin solving all of their problems with it the same way people have been doing with KiXtart for some time now simply due to the comfort level they have with the language. PowerShell is extremely powerful, but at this stage I see it demonstrated more as a great command line tool than as a scripting language (mostly simple examples and very few traditional script files). I’ll definitely give some time to this topic and will be watching your blog too!
Posted by: Bob | December 5, 2006 9:43 PM