Windows 8 - First thoughts and future telephone support issues

Now that Windows 8 has been released I've been having a play with it this weekend. In terms of usability I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it currently. On the one hand I'm sure in time I could come to get used to the new way of doing things, and the workarounds to enable the old ways, but on the other I can only imagine the pain and misery to come from trying to do telephone support for it.

The key problem I see is with the schizophrenic nature of Windows 8. Having two completely different UIs within a single OS will at best make things interesting, at worst confuse the hell out of people.

It's not helped by a lack of distinction between the two in regards to names. For instance, now that it's no longer officially called Metro, we have the Desktop and the Modern UI, but the latter isn't a name it's a description! The Desktop UI doesn't exactly look dated either, in fact I'd say it was positively modern. What will we call it in several years time when the "Modern UI" is anything but? It's not helped by many sources also referring to it as the Windows 8 UI, therefore throwing three different names into the mix.

Then there's Internet Explorer, with two essentially different applications using the same name. They function differently, have different options and ways of doing things, yet how do you easily differentiate them verbally? I've seen enough users struggle to understand what IE is at the best of times, but at least then you can tell them to look for the big blue "e". Now you also have to check which UI they're using, otherwise your instructions will be meaningless.

Internet Explorer also handles downloads differently, which could be fun for anyone using a remote support application (eg, getting the client to go to a URL, enter some details, and run a program to give you remote access to their machine). Since IE 9 the download dialog window has been tied to the window that initiated it. If the download was initiated via a popup (eg it provides the download link to click), and that popup closed once the download started, the download dialog would disappear once completed. Fortunately you could bring it back by pressing CTRL-J, and then choose to save or run the download. This still works in the desktop IE 10, but doesn't in Metro IE 10. Instead you get a dialog appear for 2 or 3 seconds giving you the run / save / cancel options, and if you don't respond in time it vanishes. Thus far I've been unable to find a way to retrieve it other than running the download again.

All that said, I have found a few handy features.

Windows + D - Show Desktop - Nothing new here, but importantly it will get you out of Metro to the normal desktop UI.

Windows + C - Charms menu - This is the Metro menu you get by hovering to the right hand corners to access things like settings, shutdown/restart etc.

Windows + Z - Tabs / Address menu in Metro IE and All apps from Metro start page - Again, saves messing around with tricky mouse positioning.

Finally, while there's no way to disable Metro on startup, there is a work around to make getting to the desktop easier. On the metro start screen, drag the Desktop tile up to the top left hand corner (eg top row, first column). Now after typing your password and pressing Enter to login you can immediately go to the desktop by pressing Enter a second time (since the top left tile is automatically selected).

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w8itprogeneral/thread/66df8624-d6bc-46c8-a7a8-2600c6f12193

PowerShell help system and reference site

So I've been reading various bits of information about PowerShell recently, and I think perhaps the most important thing I've seen is the quality of the help system. After all, who wants to try memorising masses of cmdlet switches and options, when you might only use them once in a blue moon!

Checking out the wealth of information flowing forth from the get-help cmdlet was very satisfying, made me reminisce of my days with the Linux Man pages, in fact it's nice to see that not only has 'man' been setup as an alias for get-help, but it's even been aliased to use ' more', making it function more like the traditional man system.

I have got one complaint though which I've yet to find a resolve for (if there is one), and that's the inability to scroll back up the page. Great I can page down with Space, go down a line with Enter, but how do I go back up!?! It would have been nice to be able to use the up and down arrows as well like you can with man, so you can view the detail of an option, and then scroll back up to the syntax list or where ever without having to leave help and start again.

Hopefully I'm just missing something somewhere, but so far I don't think so.

By the way, if you're looking for a good guide to PowerShell then I can highly recommend the Windows PowerShell v2.0 Reference from the Microsoft scripting guys which you can find here http://blogs.technet.com/b/csps/p/psref.aspx. It covers all the basics you'll need to know, and points you in the right direction to find out more. Plus I've always liked the informal writing style of the scripting guys, it's a much nicer read than your average MS reference.

Getting started with PowerShell

So what is it about PowerShell that interests me? Well as someone who started out in the server admin world with a hand full of Linux boxes, albeit in a fairly amateur capacity, I've always naturally been comfortable working at a command prompt. In a Windows world though it's always seemed that to automate anything via scripting there are so many ways to do things, depending on what you want to achieve, with none of them really covering all the bases. Traditional batchscripts, vbscript, wmi, adsi, no one scripting technology really covers everything, and you end up using a collection of things, with one method calling another method etc, since each method lends itself so well to some things more than others.

For instance, I in one script I wrote, you've got a batchscript handling the basic flow and logic of the script, that then calls a few of the GNU ported linux functions like grep, tail, wget etc, and uses vbscript to handle sending e-mail using the JMail component, and at one point calling WMI functions as well!

When I first heard about PowerShell it sounded like finally there might be a language I could invest some time into learning, safe in the knowledge that it could cover what ever I was trying to achieve. Of course like many things there was the question, 'is this too good to be true?', and at first it was. After all, it's great that you can control Windows 2008, Exchange 2007 and SQL Server 2008 etc via PowerShell, but when you're still predominantly using 2003, 2003 and 2005, that's not a lot of use. Now of course things have changed, and it's worth taking the time to learn the language, so that's what I'm determined to do. I think my first challenge will be to get my head about the basics of the language itself, and how the flow control etc is supposed to work, and then work on re-writing many of my more commonly used scripts to use PowerShell instead.

I'll keep you posted on how I get on.