Jeff Wouters's Blog

As I am attending Citrix Synergy in Anaheim this week I’m hearing a lot of cool new stuff, both from Citrix and the 3rd party vendors which are located in the Expo hall. One of the announcements from Citrix in the keynote was about the Windows Mobile SDK by Citrix… but no one in the room applauded for this and I think that’s just plain crazy… so I decided to write this post.

The idea of the Citrix Windows Mobile SDK is that you write an application as you would write them for a normal desktop or terminal server. Instead of re-writing the application for a mobile device, simply publish the application through the Citrix product and it does the conversion of the interface to a mobile format for you! So no re-writing your code or doing some fancy checks to see which UI you’re to show depending on the device the app is shown on… that’s great, right?!
… and none of the 6000+ people in the room applauded for this… (? wtf ?)

I don’t know anything your about the technical details of this, but the concept itself sounds just magically amazing

After a long day of PowerShell deep technical sessions and a nice dinner after, I woke up this morning and after heaving some breakfast someone came to me at my hotel. She was one of the two woman at the Summit. She asked me if I wanted a ride to the Summit and because Ed and Theresa Wilson drove me around the entire week, I was about to decline her offer… until she mentioned she drove a Mustang! So the way towards the Summit we ‘accidentally’ took a wrong turn, just so that we could do a 180

Arrived at the Summit the sessions began. First up was Ed Wilson, this time about PoSHMon which basically involves PowerShell working with performance monitors. A great session as always when Ed takes the stage but this time with lots and lots of resources mentioned. Very useful and practical resources to be precise!

After a short break it was time for Steve Lee to takes the stage. His session was all about Standards-based hardware management. Just think about what it would be like to simply change hardware settings from a PowerShell prompt throughout your environment and don’t think a that this would be limited to Windows devices… Cool stuff, right?!

And then there was  Richard Siddaway again, this time about the PowerShell Web Access. Now the way Richard presents at this event is very appealing to me, deep technical and very fast paced Richard showed us how you can delegate tasks in the PowerShell Web Access without providing people too much rights. So just give them the rights they need to perform their tasks, nothing more. Need to expand on their rights? That’s ac tally a lot easier than you might think…

Advanced Networking Scripting with Windows PowerShell by Lee Holmes was the next mindboggling session. Using a simple Invoke-WebRequest to a website is done unencrypted but very easy to do. But using WinRM is encrypted and a little bit harder. The point being here that WinRM is used for remote management and there for must be secure. Doing that insecure is not something desirable. Lee has shown us much, much more cool and very interesting stuff and to me personally his session explained why Microsoft does some things in PowerShell that seemed a little strange to me. There are actually darn good reasons why they do it the way they do… I always suspected something like it, but now I know for sure and their motivations behind the choices.

Grading 5000 scripts during the Scripting Games will teach you some things. Both some very creative solutions but also things a lot of beginners encounter and do it wrong. This was the subject of Ed Wilson’s session. One of his major points was to PIPE TO THE LEFT!! Guess what… that’s also covered in my chapter for the PowerShell Deep Dives book. It may not be a very deep technical subject but I see everybody from beginner to advanced scripted totally forget about it and using the Where-Object approach where it isn’t needed.

Some time ago I had the pleasure to be included in a mailing about passwords in scripts to use for providing alternate credentials. Do you save passwords hardcoded in your scripts, do you save them in a file as a secure string or do you prompt the user for credentials where the user needs to know the username+password? Or do you have a 3rd party solution to cover this? This gave a very nice discussion which was the whole purpose of the session… to discuss this and get or provide alternate views on this challenge.

After this we went out to dinner again but this time the group grew a little… it was about 40+ PowerShell folk