If you’ve done much looking around, you know that there’s an awful lot of great information about PowerShell available on the web. The community that has formed around this product is one of its strengths. You’re probably familiar with the name Tobias Weltner. His Master-PowerShell e-book has long been a resource that I’ve turned to for examples and explanations. I recently watched a webcast that Dr. Weltner did as part of a series of webcasts at idera.com. The title of the webcast is “Speeding up PowerShell: Multithreading”. When I got the announcement, I thought it was going to be about using the [System.Threading] namespace. Boy, was I wrong.

The talk starts off with discussing times when it might make sense to avoid using the pipeline. Once you see the material, it’s makes perfect sense. He then moves to using PowerShell jobs to perform tasks, discussing the pros and cons of that approach. Finally, he talks about using the Runspace class to run separate PowerShell instances. It uses the classes, but still manages to be very readable, very approachable PowerShell. He provides several examples in each section (including a function that executes a PowerShell scriptblock with a timeout, something I’ve never seen before).

All in all, this was easily the best webcast on PowerShell I’ve ever watched. Unlike most Powershell videos I’ve seen, it wasn’t targeting a beginner, but someone who already knows the basics of scripting and wants to learn more. The techniques he presents are, as I have said, very straightforward and explained very well. I can already think of several examples of code that I’m probably going to be writing in the near future based on this presentation.