PowerShell and I

I will start by saying that a person’s overall experience is no indication of his/her knowledge. I have over 10 years of experience and I spent the first five years supporting desktop systems and applications. Then, I changed my job and went to a company which had lots of enterprise clients and this was in the year of 2005 when VB Scripting was very famous among system administrators. I was told by my seniors that scripting was too complex and difficult to learn. I tried learning VB Script and gave up very soon. My journey of learning and using scripting ended even before starting.

After this, things have changed quite a bit for me. I joined my current company and went to UK for an internal training on IT systems. I met several bright people there who inspired me to get started again in scripting. Especially Ben – our IT Manager – was a great scripter himself. He said, “Aman, PowerShell is very easy and it’s very easy to learn” – maybe he was just comforting me, I thought. He gifted me a book on PowerShell – Windows PowerShell 2.0 for dummies.

Once I came to speed, I quickly started using PowerShell for basis activities including:

  • Using PowerShell as a calculator
  • System ping, reboot, and shutdown
  • Working with files and folders
  • Open applications, etc

As Ben said, PowerShell is straight forward and simple to learn. All I needed was some focus and enthusiasm to learn. My first script was, starting a stopped service but with some simple logic.

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$a = Get-Service WinRM            
if($a.Status -eq "Stopped")
{
	$a.Start()
}
elseIf($a.Status -eq "Running")
{
	echo $a.Name "is running"
}

PowerShell scripting seemed easy to me and I finally wrote a 100-line script and posted it on PowerShell.com. There were 73 downloads and I even got an email from a user of this script and he said that he liked it and thanked me for the script. This was the first kick! I told to myself, yes, I am scripter! And, I was very happy.

The “PowerShell community”, are a group of great IT guys and very nice people! Everyone I met or interacted with – Ed Wilson, Shay Levy, and many more – inspired me a lot. Ed helped me create the New Delhi PowerShell User Group and Shay helps almost every day and answered all my questions!

If I have to describe the PowerShell community in a single phrase, I’d say “they are the best”!

I am currently writing two blogs, one is dedicated to the New Delhi PowerShell User Group  and another one is on SCOM.

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