PowerShell Studio - A Comprehensive Guide

A few months ago I started taking on a new quest to write an in-depth, comprehensive book about SAPIEN's PowerShell Studio. When I first started writing this book I could not have known the outpouring of interest that it would get from hundreds of PowerShell users.

Many PowerShell scripters will tell you that the idea of creating GUI applications for PowerShell scripts is absurd and breaks the very essence of scripting. However, you must keep in mind that even though your scripts may seem logical and easy to use to you, they may not be quite so understandable or so easy to use for many helpdesk personnel or beginning IT personnel.

The purpose of scripting is to provide a more efficient, robust, automated, customizable solution to the many repeatable processes that are involved in Information Technology every day. You can take the same PowerShell scripts that you or others have created and present them in a very easy to use and understandable GUI application that can be quickly deployed and used by others with no scripting experience at all. That saves training costs, reduces human errors, increases productivity, and helps overall lower overhead.

PowerShell scripting has become a must know skill set for any Windows System Administrator. We can do things more efficiently, faster, with repeatable results and tremendously more power over local and remote systems than ever in the past. However, this also shifted a lot of responsibilities to Systems Administrators that in the past were handled by help desk technicians, because many technicians did not understand the use of PowerShell scripts and parameter requirements, etc. This imbalance of workload caused System Administrators and Software Developers to find a way to utilize the much-needed PowerShell scripts but also at the same time to empower less technical personnel with the ability to use the numerous scripts that developers were churning out. This caused a shift towards PowerShell GUI applications.

I have been extensively using PowerShell Studio for several years, and have developed several large-scale applications, and hundreds of smaller applications for both corporate and government agencies. When I first started, there was very little training documentation outside of Sapien Technologies, and even though they did a great job documenting many of the countless features in PowerShell Studio, it was cumbersome finding the information and there was still some undocumented areas.

Above is just a sample of the content in the book. I am ahead of schedule for completion of the book, right now I am neck deep in explaining controls, examples, and step by step screenshots.