PowerShell Mini-Series?

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I recently took my 70-410 and used itpro.tv as a supplement to my textbook study guides. When taking the test, I realized that there was A TON of PowerShell questions, and there's no wonder why, either; Microsoft put a lot of work into making the newest iteration of PowerShell actually powerful.

Perhaps you guys could dedicate a few videos solely to managing roles and performing common tasks through Powershell? Perhaps a mini-episode dedicated each to managing DNS, DHCP, ADDS, Hyper-V, and other common administration tasks strictly from PowerShell? It may not be super heavily used in the real world, but it is definitely an enormous part of the exam itself.

P.S: For anyone who wasn't aware, the 70-410, 70-411, and 70-412 all switched to Server 2012 R2 as of March 15, 2014. I did not realize this until I went to take the test, and wanted to make sure people knew this beforehand to prevent any panic attacks in the testing room.

Thanks for making the suggestion! Since the exam does tend to cover this heavily it's worth the time and effort to consider as and additional show. Like you, there are more and more things that we're seeing that only can be done with powershell. I'll bring it up and see what we can do!
Cordially,
Ronnie Wong
Host ITProTV

I agree with Brian. This would be awesome to watch. Thank you.
Kind Regards,
Paul

Ronnie,
I would love to see this covered as well. Has there been any updates with reguards to adding a class for Powershell?
Thanks,
David

David,
We've talked about it. Scheduled it, not yet. I'll mention it again and see. I know there's been a increasing request for it too!
Cordially,
Ronnie Wong
Host, ITProTV

Ronnie,
Thanks for the update. I will be looking forward to the posiblility of a furture show
(s).
Thanks,
David

Add my vote for requesting a Powershell mini-series.

This would most definitely be beneficial. Add my vote for a PowerShell Mini-Series.

toss my hat in for this idea. I've been looking for something like this.

Add my vote as well. For as much as Microsoft is pushing powershell in both use as well as testing, I think this is very important. The courses I've seen so far do lightly touch on certain precise examples to accomplish certain goals, but a more heavily focused primer would be awesome.

How do you get addons to power shell? Every time i try to do stuff that on these videos they have stuff that my power shell just does not have but they never say how in the heck to install any of the addons or even were in the heck I am to get them.

Laurence,
What version of powershell are you running? We're using the Powershell 4.0, which I believe is in Windows 2012 R2 You can find this from using the Get-Host...
Cordially,
Ronnie Wong
Host, ITProTV

You can get it on Windows 7 by installing Windows Management Framework 4.0 as well. I use it every day in my current (uncertified of course) server administration role for a large enterprise.
A lot of your long-timers don't use it because they prefer VBS, but I learned it on their helpdesk and was able to use it for many purposes so I have turned it into a standard on my team at the company where its applicable.
That said I also support a powershell course and would be happy to help with knowledge about it. In the meantime for those guys who are interested, the microsoft virtual academy (microsoftvirtualacademy.com) does some powershell Jump Start series hosted by Jeffrey Snover who was the chief architect behind it. He actually has some interesting insights which might help you pick it up.
Powershell is not about memorizing commands, but learning how to use the help to get the answers in real-time as needed to accomplish your goals. Any respectable powershell module you add should have plenty of information in it's help files, if it doesn't I wouldn't use it.

I also took the 70-410 and failed in part because of some obscure Powershell commands. A powershell series is totally needed. Main things were adding ADDS/Promote a DC, if that is a Install-WindowsFeature or if it is an ADDS powershell command. There were many others as well.

Also there was one question that included script blocks which i am only now reading about in an ebook.

Great idea! I just took the 410 and failed with a 600. There were questions regarding powershell commands that I've yet to see in any texts/practice exams.

William, I also just took 410 and got 550. Was your exam comprised of interactive gui's? Did you test with Prometric or Pearson Vue? As far a powershell and a mini-series I think the concentration should be slightly more sophisticated and revolved about advantaged commands like promoting dc's and explaining how to understand long strings of options. We have to assume that anyone interested in the mini-series has already gotten some foundations under themselves.

My recommendation here is that you learn to use Get-Help to your advantage. That's the way the shell was designed. It isn't designed to be remembered. Now, that said it depends on your version of powershell (Windows Management Framework) but you will probably want to use:
Get-Help -full or Get-Help -showwindow
The 1st will list it all into the buffer, but the primary point of it is that it describes each of the switches and what kind of input they take. If your version supports -showwindow you get it in a pop-out window (same content as -full)
This is the easiest way to read about a commandlet, the examples, and how best to use them. Unfortunately "Get-Help" isn't available on a test, but as long as you cover the AD commandlets and firewall commands you're probably alright. Although I must admit i've only taken the practice test a couple of times so far due to time constraints.

I disagree and think we can do better than Get-Help. For one the exam doesn't let you use get-help and second you should absolutely get aware of as many commands as possible.

I'm getting at the "day-to-day" use, not necessarily the exam. Trying to memorize all the commandlets is a path likely destined for failure, especially considering they left it open so that anyone can create commandlets using a .NET language.