As you might imagine I get a lot of questions about how to get started with PowerShell, especially what books and material they can get their hands on. While I earn living creating books, training videos and offering live training, I’m aware that many people are on a budget so if you are looking for…
Category: PowerShell 4.0
Change is in the air
If you have read my blog for any length of time, or followed me, then you know that I have contributed a lot of content to a number of online resources over the years, often on a recurring basis. You may not realize it, but spreading out my workload over several sites can be quite…
Pimp your Prompt
If you are like me and live in PowerShell, then you spend a great deal of your day looking at your PowerShell prompt. That little indicator in the console and ISE that usually shows where you are. That little part of your PowerShell world is defined by a built-in function called Prompt. You can easily…
More PowerShell Laziness
A few days ago I posted an article on using Update-TypeData to provide shortcuts to object properties. These shortcuts might save a few keystrokes typing, especially if you use tab completion. They can also give you more meaningful output. But you can take this even further and save yourself even more typing. How many of…
New PowerShell Pluralsight Course
I am so happy to announce that my first course under the Pluralsight badge has been released. My latest course is titled PowerShell v4 New Features. This course is aimed at IT Pros with previous experience using PowerShell, especially PowerShell v3. The course runs just under 3 hours (although it felt much longer than that…
Creating a DSC Configuration Template
During the recent TechEd in Houston, there was a lot of talk and excitement about Desired State Configuration, or DSC. I’m not going to cover DSC itself here but rather address a minor issue for those of you just getting started. When you build a configuration, how can your figure out what resource settings to…
Configure Local User Account with DSC
Yesterday I posted an article on how to use PowerShell and the [ADSI] type accelerator to set a local user account. However, if you are running PowerShell 4.0 you have another option: Desired State Configuration (DSC). I’m going to assume you have some basic understanding of how DSC works. If not, head over to the…
Creating CIM Scripts without Scripting
When Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 came out, along with PowerShell 3.0, we got our hands on some terrific technology in the form of the CIM cmdlets. Actually, we got much more than people realize. One of the reasons there was a big bump in the number of shipping modules and cmdlets was CDXML….
I Want PowerShell 4.0
I’ve been writing a bit about PowerShell 4.0 lately, especially on my Prof. PowerShell column. If you are running Windows 7 it isn’t too difficult to go to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40855 and download the Windows Management Framework 4 package. Remember you will also need version 4.5 of the .NET Framework. This will also apply to Windows Server…