Arno Nel 2.0

9:30 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Microsoft Scripting Guys, Microsoft Corporation
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.

9:30 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Microsoft Scripting Guys, Microsoft Corporation
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.

2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Pacific Time
Microsoft Scripting Guys, Microsoft Corporation
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.

9:30 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Microsoft Scripting Guys, Microsoft Corporation
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.

9:30 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Microsoft Scripting Guys, Microsoft Corporation
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.

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Pacific Time
Alain Lissoir, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Dealing with passwords and correct security contexts under Microsoft Windows when running scripts can be a real challenge from a security standpoint. Questions like "how do I securely prompt for passwords in a script?" or "how do I securely hide passwords in a script?" are real concerns for administrators and script developers. In this webcast we will demonstrate the various tools and techniques available under Windows to handle these challenges. We will show a typical Windows Script Host (WSH) example using Collaboration Data Object (CDO) to carry alerts over secure SMTP sessions and using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for monitoring purposes. The script sample structure and its usage will be described, so you can understand what the issues are. In addition, we will examine the various challenges an administrator/script writer will face when developing their solutions.

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Pacific Time
Mitch Ruebush, Microsoft Regional Director; Visual Developer - .NET MVP; Architect | Evangelist ; Microsoft Corporation
Although .NET is powerful and flexible enough to handle any scenario, occasionally you need to write administrative scripts using VBScript or you need to write Office macros that interact with a .NET component. In this webcast you will learn how to create .NET components that can be called from script, as well as the techniques you will need to call these components remotely.

9:30 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Microsoft Scripting Guys, Microsoft Corporation
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.

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific Time
Ron Cundiff, MSDN Developer Community Champion, Microsoft Corporation
Just how powerful is the ability to invoke Web services from your client-side script?  In this webcast, we'll explore that capability, and provide an example of a complete implementation of a Web application that incorporates Web service calls into its architecture and invokes this functionality from a Web page through the use of client-side script.  Specifically, we'll look at building and testing a sample Web service using Microsoft Visual Studio 2003.  Next, we'll look at two ways of consuming the Web service from a Web page using script, the simple way and with advanced scripting techniques using XMLHTTP.  Finally, we'll tie all of these concepts together in order to consume the Web service with style, using XML, XMLHTTP, and XSL.

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Pacific Time
Microsoft Scripting Guys, Microsoft Corporation
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.

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific Time
Microsoft Scripting Guys, Microsoft Corporation
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.