Scripting Guys' Webcasts

The Scripting Guys provide a thorough introduction to Windows PowerShell. What is Windows PowerShell? How does it work? Come to the webcasts and find out.

Scripting Week 3 is all about kicking it up a notch - some fancy tricks to enhance your scripts. Go to the Scripting Week 3 page to find all the webcasts, downloads, Q & A logs, and supplemental materials for Scripting Week 3. Or, download audio of the Scripting Guys’ Week 3 webcasts in either MP3 or WMA format.

Monday January 24, 2005
If you don't seem to remember much about the ADSI webcast from Scripting Week 1, don't feel bad: there wasn't an ADSI webcast in Scripting Week 1. But that's all right, that just makes Scripting Week 2 that much better. In this webcast, the Scripting Guys give you the lowdown on ADSI, showing how you can use this technology to manage - among many other things - users and groups in Active Directory and on your local computers. This is guaranteed to be the best (and first) ADSI webcast ever offered during a Scripting Week.

Tuesday January 25, 2005
Now that you've attended the WMI webcast from Scripting Week 1 and downloaded the Scriptomatic, you might think you know everything you'll ever need to know about WMI. And you do … unless you need to work with dates and times, or unless you'd like to monitor performance, or unless you'd like to understand enough about the internal workings of WMI to write your own Scriptomatic. Or unless - well, you get the idea. In this webcast the Scripting Guys divulge more of the useful secrets of WMI.

Tuesday January 25, 2005
Script writers often spend hours tweaking and polishing their code, trying to get output that looks just right. After all, script writers want to create finished reports that won't embarrass them when those reports end up on their manager's desk. Unfortunately, VBScript by itself won't let you create fancy reports. So why spend hours trying to create a graph using plain old VBScript when Microsoft Excel can create that graph for you? In this webcast, the Microsoft Scripting Guys will introduce you to the Microsoft Office object model and they’ll show you how you can harness the power of applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel to create powerful system administration scripts you never dreamed were possible.

Wednesday January 26, 2005
Remember the story about the grasshopper and the ant? If so, then you recall how the grasshopper danced and played all summer long while the ant spent her time writing scripts that used WMI events to alert her to potential problems like servers running low on disk space. Well, come winter the grasshopper lost his job, tried to rob a grocery store, and is now serving time in prison. The ant was promoted to CIO, and now she get to dance and play all summer long. The moral of the story: unless you have 5-to-10 years to spare, don't be a grasshopper. Watch this webcast and learn how WMI events can help you monitor and maintain your systems.

Thursday January 27, 2005
After you watched the first Scripting Week webcasts you likely thought to yourself, "Well, this is all useful information, but I bet there are plenty of things they aren't telling us. I bet those Scripting Guys are keeping the really good stuff for themselves." Well, you were right; during Scripting Week 1 we did keep all the good stuff for ourselves! (Well, maybe not all the good stuff, but some of it.) In this webcast, though, we’ll fill you in on all those cool scripting techniques we didn’t have time to discuss in Scripting Week 1, including such things as: using the Dictionary object; sorting data; and writing scripts that read from and write to the registry.

Friday January 28, 2005
Ever sit in someone's home and wonder what would happen if you stripped, ripped and painted as you pleased? So did the Scripting Guys, but no one would let us redecorate their home. Therefore, we decided to do the next best thing: we swapped scripts and stripped, ripped, painted, and re-coded each other's scripts as we pleased. In this webcast the Scripting Guys show how you can take sample scripts, like those found in the TechNet Script Center, and modify them to serve your enterprise-wide needs.

Friday January 28, 2005
Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) provides developers with a dedicated directory store for their applications, a sort of "mini-Active Directory" that programs can call their own. That feature is good in and of itself. But what makes ADAM even more useful is that these mini-Active Directories can be configured and managed using ADSI scripts. In this webcast, the Microsoft Scripting Guys will introduce you to ADAM, and show you how you can write simple ADSI scripts to manage everything from ADAM users to ADAM groups to ADAM OUs.

Monday February 28, 2005
During Scripting Week 2 (January 24-28, 2005), viewers were asked to submit sample scripts as one of the requirements for earning a free Scripting Guys T-shirt. In this follow-up webcast, the Scripting Guys present some of the scripts they found particularly useful or interesting, examining key sections of the code and explaining why they singled out these scripts over all the rest. Join this webcast for an enlightening examination of what works and works well when it comes to scripts, scripts written by IT Professionals like yourself.

Monday July 19, 2004
So maybe you’ve been saying to yourself, “Yes, I’d like to learn scripting, I want to know how to automate my system administration tasks, I’d like to know all about WMI and ADSI and stuff like that. But I don’t know where to begin.” Well, start right here, with part one of a five-part series-presented by the Microsoft Scripting Guys and Dr. Scripto-designed to take you from newbie to scripting whiz in one short week. This opening session sets the stage for the rest of the week. Be ready to fire up cmd.exe and run some code.

Tuesday July 20, 2004
WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is the 800-pound gorilla of system administration scripting on Microsoft Windows. In this webcast, part two in a five-part series, the Microsoft Scripting Guys explain how to harness this powerful technology and use it to quickly and easily write your own system administration scripts. If all those acronyms and classes always seemed scary, you'll get to know and love them here.

Wednesday July 21, 2004
In this webcast, number three in a five-part series, The Microsoft Scripting Guys help you get your feet wet, showing you how to use scripts to automate many of your file management tasks, with practical examples that will get you into the swim of things right away.

Thursday July 22, 2004
The Scripting Guys and Dr. Scripto delve deep into the mysteries of input and output - and find that they're not so mysterious after all. In this webcast, number four in a five-part series on introductory scripting, the Microsoft Scripting Guys walk you through practical examples of how to get information into and out of your scripts. These are fundamental techniques, essential to scripting in an IT environment.

Friday July 23, 2004
It’s the Iron Scripter competition, in which the Microsoft Scripting Guys square off to decide, once and for all, who is the most powerful scripter in the world (or at least who does the best job in this particular webcast). Along the way, in this final lesson in this five-part series on introductory scripting, the Scripting Guys will provide examples that reinforce and build upon what you’ve learned earlier in the series.

It would be hard to write a useful script that doesn't work with strings in one way or another. VBScript includes a number of functions that enable you to chop, reorder and search within strings. Scripters are often forced to develop fascinating combinations of the likes of Left, Len, RTrim, Replace and InStr to search and shape a string to a given purpose. But beyond these functions lies a less-explored method of working with strings - Regular Expressions. Embrace the unknown! Join the Scripting Guys in this webcast for a walk through this mysterious world.

So you've installed Microsoft® Windows® XP Service Pack 2, and now your computers are safe and secure-so secure, in fact, that you can no longer manage those machines using your WMI and ADSI scripts! Fortunately, there's no need to panic: This webcast with the legendary Microsoft Scripting Guys will show you how to make sure all your existing scripts will continue to work once Service Pack 2 is installed. Along the way, the Scripting Guys will also introduce some of the new scriptable items in Service Pack 2, including the Windows Firewall, Windows Update, and a new WMI class for anti-virus software.

Active Directory® has been a boon to system administrators, enabling them to combine scores of small Windows NT® 4.0 domains into a single, unified directory service. This makes resources more accessible for users, but can be intimidating to administrators paralyzed at the thought of all the new management tasks facing them. But don’t despair: there is an easier way. In this webcast for the IT Professional the Microsoft Scripting Guys will introduce the fundamentals of writing ADSI scripts to automate the management of users, groups, OUs, and everything else found in Active Directory. As a special bonus, the webcast will give you a sneak peek at the basic concepts behind using scripts to secure and delegate control of AD and AD objects.

Once you begin to master the basics of system administration scripting, you are faced with two questions. First, where do I go from here? And second, how do I get there? In this follow-up to the Scripting Week webcasts, the Microsoft Scripting Guys will introduce you to the tools, documentation, Web sites, and other resources that will help you make full use of your new-found scripting knowledge.

So you're intrigued by Windows Server 2003, but, at the same time, you're a bit intimidated by all the changes. IIS is more powerful, but also looks a little different. Print server capabilities are much improved, but how do you administer them? Shadow copying sounds interesting, but how do you implement it? Relax and tune in to this webcast, where the Microsoft Scripting Guys take you on a whirlwind tour of Windows Server 2003 management, showing how Windows Server 2003’s improved scripting capabilities make it easy to manage print servers, deal with shadow copying, administer IIS, and much, much more.

In our previous Scripting webcast on January 22, entitled “Database Scripting for System Administrators,” we showed you how to write scripts that work with databases. This time, the Microsoft Scripting Guys dig a little deeper and introduce some useful database design ideas, such as reference tables and using link tables to model many-to-many relationships. Then, we take a closer look at the SQL language that enables you to bring the data in those tables back together. And, if that's not enough, we also look at filtering, inner and outer joins, and aggregation.

What do you find when the Microsoft Scripting Guys poke around a typical enterprise's Active Directory? How about accounts that are due to expire, computers missing service packs, published print queues, the names of all your domain controllers, a list of all your user accounts, and more? Join this webcast as the Microsoft Scripting Guys show how to write scripts that take advantage of ActiveX Database Objects (ADO) to search Active Directory for all of these items (and more). The webcast will cover the two primary search "dialects" for AD: SQL queries and LDAP queries.

Users and groups: you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. Managing user and group accounts is an important part of system administration and, in this webcast, the Microsoft Scripting Guys show you how you can use simple ADSI scripts to manage user and group accounts in Active Directory, in Windows NT 4.0 domains, and on local computers. Oh: and because we mentioned it in the title, we show you how these same scripts can be used to manage Active Directory OUs, as well.

Have you mastered the art of using text files as a way to store data? Are you beginning to think that sifting through 10,000-line text files and trying to generate statistics and look for trends isn’t as easy or as much fun as it sounded? If so, then you might be ready to start using databases as a way to get data into, and save data out of, your system administration scripts. In this webcast, the Scripting Guys show you how to add ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) to your scripting arsenal.

How many of you have thought to yourself, “You know, the Scripting Guys aren’t so great. The only difference between them and me is that they know how to create HTAs and I don’t.” Well, now comes your big chance: in this webcast, we show you how you can create your very own HTAs. Tune in, and you’ll never need the Scripting Guys again!

(HTAs, of course, are Hypertext Applications. What does that mean? In practical terms HTAs provide a simple way to add a graphical user interface to your scripts: you can use HTAs to display nicely formatted output; use HTAs to add dialog boxes to your scripts, complete with buttons, dropdown lists, check boxes, and other graphical goodies; use HTAs to create your very own “-omatics,” just like the world-famous Scriptomatic. If you are tired of typing in long commands at the command prompt or if your eyes are burning from trying to decipher output displayed in a command window, this is the webcast for you!)

A powerful scripting environment is an indispensable tool in the fight to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by automating system and network administration tasks. Windows Script Host (WSH), used in conjunction with ADSI and the WMI scripting library, provides just such a scripting environment.

In this presentation, you’ll learn what scripting is, how it might be useful to you, and how to write and run a script. You’ll then see the development of two example scripts. The first example demonstrates some useful basics, while the second example introduces some functionality that is a little more advanced and very powerful.

At the end, you’ll learn about the new resource kit System Administration Scripting Guide and receive pointers to other useful system admin scripting information.