At the May 26, 2011 Boston Azure User Group meeting, Joel Bennett – a Microsoft PowerShell MVP from the Rochester, NY area – spoke about PowerShell basics, then got into a bunch of useful ways PowerShell can be applied to Windows Azure. We had around 25 people at the event.

[Update 23-June-2011: Joel Bennett posted his slide deck from the talk.] 
[Update 05-July-2011: Added another handy link to post from Patrick Butler called Developing and Debugging Azure Management API CmdLets.]

Some of the pointers:

• Go get the PowerShell Community Extensions (from codeplex)
• You can use the PS command line to CD into folders/directories, look at files, etc. — but you can also look at the Registry or your Certificate Store as if they were directories!
• There are no plural nouns in PS (e.g., get-provider, not get-providers)
• Learn these commands first: Get-Command, Get-Help, Get-Member, Select-Object, Where-Object, Format-Table, … others you can learn later
• Somebody needs to write a PowerShell Provider for Azure Storage
• Joel created an open-shell WPF-ish PowerShell shell called POSH

Try some commands:

• dir | get-objec
• dir | fl *  —formats as lis
• get-verb | fw -col
• get-verb | fw -col 6 -groupby Group
• Get-ExecutionPolicy
• dir | where { $_.PSIsContainer } — where $_ is “the thing over there (directory)”
• dir | select CreationTime, Name | gm
• dir | select * —will look different than command above
• $global:foo = “some value”
• cd c:\windows\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0… see Help.format.ps1xml controls the default output formatting properties for object types not already known by PowerShell – can have property names, even script blocks in it – very powerful
• # is single-line comment char; <# … #> for multi-line comments
• You can create aliases for scripts
• Powershell is an interpreted scripting language
• Can access WinForms, WPF, lots of stuff.. though not Threading

Three ways to manage Azure from PowerShell

1. Remoting
2. WASM (Windows Azure Services Management commandlets) – superceded by http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/ – developed by Development Evangelist group (e.g., Vittorio)
3. Cerebrata (3rd party, commercial)

Remoting:

• Need to get some goodness in a Startup Script, along with crecentials
• Set OS Family = 2 (so you get Windows Server 2008 R2)
• Need a certificate – can be self-signed

WAP PowerShell:

• 36 Cmdlets
• “the 80% library”
• very good example

Cerebrata Cmdlets

• Requires .NET 4.0 (which is different than baseline support for PS, which is .NET CLR 2.0
• $70
• 114 Cmdlets
• Cerebrata
• gcm –mo cerebrata | gr0up Noun | sort

Snap-ins need to be in the GAC – so put WAP PowerShell stuff where you want to keep them, since that’s where they’ll be built — or build the file in Visual Studio

• Add-Module is for SNAPINS
• IPMO is for ImportModule for Modules
• ipmo AzurePlatform
• gcm –mo AzurePlatform

PowerShell has something called “splatting”

• Starting with a hashtable… put in the parms you’ll need
• variables start with $
• retrieving (splatting) starts with @

Both cerebrata and WAP are snap-ins

WHAT FOLLOWS… are somewhat random notes I captured…

Get-Certificate $azure | Get-HostedCertificateStore

Your personal profile for PowerShell lives in c:\Users\YOURNAME\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\AzurePlatform as Startup.ps1 (?)

Two kinds of errors in PowerShell: 1. Terminating Errors (exceptions, can be “trapped” or use try/catch as of PS2) and 2. Non-Terminating Errors which are harder to deal with

$? ==> did the last command succeed

dir doesnotexist –ev er –ea “”

$er[0].categoryinfo

“Don’t Produce Snap-ins!” Here’s why: to figure out what is in there (get-command –Module

Get-Module –ListAvailable

– run the above on AZure and see “NetworkLoadBalancingCl…” – is this Azure relate

OTHER INTERESTING POWERSHELL/AZURE LINKS

• http://poshcode.org/
• http://pscx.codeplex.com
• http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2011/06/30/developing-and-debugging-azure-management-api-cmdlets.aspx