Windows Workflows with PowerShell

Course Overview
Hi. I'm Thomas Lee, and I'm really excited to share my new Pluralsight course, Windows Workflows with PowerShell, with you today. For those of you who do not know me, I'm a PowerShell veteran. I was in that room in Los Angeles in 2003 on the day Microsoft first announced Monad, which later became PowerShell. And I've worked with every version of both beta and released of PowerShell ever since. I've also written and taught a huge number of PowerShell courses, a bunch for Pluralsight, in person, and I've also spoken at conferences around the world about PowerShell. I'm a real PowerShell bigot. Now the course, which has five modules, has several objectives. First we want to explain exactly what workflows are, and what PowerShell workflows are. I also want to look at what Windows Workflow Foundation is, and how that relates to PowerShell and PowerShell workflows. The core of the course is designed to show you how to write, debug, and run a workflow using PowerShell, along with a few demos that I'm sure you'd like to try out at home. Now in a departure from normal Pluralsight approaches, I actually have a module which looks at how you convert a set of scripts to a workflow. The most important part of that module is the lessons that I learned in trying to do just that. And finally, we want to give you lots of resources, both to reinforce the course details, and also to provide you with more information. So I think this is a pretty good course, and I hope you'll enjoy it, and I look forward to hearing from you.

An Overview to Workflows and PowerShell
Hello. My name is Thomas Lee, and welcome to this Pluralsight course, Windows Workflows with PowerShell. This module is an overview of Workflows with PowerShell. Now in this module we'll be doing basically three things. First we'll look at what is Workflow, an important starting point to a course on workflows. Secondly, we'll look at what is Windows Workflow Foundation, and as you'll find out, it's the component of Windows that helps you run _____ helps PowerShell run a workflow. And finally, we'll look briefly at how you can use PowerShell and Workflow.

Building Workflows Using PowerShell
Hi. I'm Thomas Lee. Welcome to this module, Building Workflows Using PowerShell. In this module, I want to start off looking at PowerShell's Workflow syntax elements, the syntax you'll use to develop workflows. These include the Workflow, Parallel, ForEach -Parallel, Sequence, and InlineScript syntax elements. I'll look at compiling a workflow, and see what happens when you run a bit of code that contains a workflow. The script should have, more importantly, the outputs of the compilation process. Workflows are similar to PowerShell, but they do have some restrictions, and I want to cover those. We'll look at using variables in Workflow as well, and again, there are some differences between using variables in workflows, and using variables in ordinary PowerShell scripts. And finally, we'll conclude with a look at some resources to help get you more information about writing workflows, and finally a module summary.

Running PowerShell Workflows
Hi. I'm Thomas Lee, and welcome to this module, Running PowerShell Workflows. In this module, I want to look at how you run a PowerShell Workflow. We'll start out with how you create the Workflow environment, the environment in which you will actually run workflows. We'll look at running workflows locally and remotely. We can run an entire workflow on a local machine or a remote machine. We'll talk about workflow parameters; parameters you can specify when running a workflow. We'll also look at common workflow and activity parameters. Now one neat thing about common activity parameters is they might allow me to run one activity within a workflow on a separate machine. We'll look at the PowerShell Workflow modules, the modules that come with PowerShell to help make workflow a bit easier, we'll look at managing workflows at runtime, and we'll finish off with a look at resources and a module summary.

Progressing from Function to Workflow
Hi, I'm Thomas Lee, and welcome to this module, Progressing from Function to Workflow. Now this module is a little bit different. In this module, what I want to do is to look at a project of converting some scripts into workflows. So I want to start off with a goal, what I'm going to try to achieve by this project. I want to look at the existing scripts that I've got, and the approach that I'm going to take to converting them into a workflow. I'll look at the good news and the bad news. I'll look at some of the issues I encountered, lessons learned, and then we'll summarize that with a module summary.

Troubleshooting Workflows
Hi. I'm Thomas Lee. Welcome to this module, Troubleshooting Workflows. This is the final module in our Workflows with PowerShell course, and in this module I want to, first of all, look at how you can debug and troubleshoot a workflow. We'll look at what information you might want to gather, and where from, to help you debug and troubleshoot your workflows. We'll look at some common troubleshooting issues you may encounter when developing and troubleshooting a workflow. We'll look at some references, and then we'll finish up with both a module and a course summary.