This week TrainSignal has been running a contest to celebrate my new PowerShell 3.0 course . All you have to do to win is enter some off-the-wall, silly or non-production use of PowerShell. I’ve posted a few examples on the TrainSignal blog this week. These Friday Fun posts I write also follow the same idea….
Category: Friday Fun
Fun ways to use PowerShell yet still learn a thing or two.
Friday Fun: It’s PowerShell, Baby!
The other day I received an email looking for guidance on using Invoke-Webrequest to pull data from a table on a web page. Specifically, he wanted to get the list of popular baby names from http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html. I gave him some quick tips but figured this would also be another teaching opportunity. Using Invoke-Webrequest with PowerShell…
Friday Fun: View Objects in a PowerShell GridList
One of the things that makes PowerShell easy to learn is discoverability. Want to know more about a particular type of object? Pipe it to Get-Member. Or if you want to see values pipe it to Select-Object. get-ciminstance win32_computersystem | select * That’s not too bad. Or you can pipe to Out-Gridview. Get-CimInstance win32_computersystem |…
Friday Fun: A PowerShell Tickler
I spend a lot of my day in the PowerShell console. As you might imagine, I often have a lot going on and sometimes it is a challenge to keep on top of everything. So I thought I could use PowerShell to help out. I created a PowerShell tickler system. Way back in the day…
Friday Fun PowerShell Commands by Noun
One of PowerShell’s greatest strength’s is discoverability. Once you know how, it is very easy to discover what you can do with PowerShell and how. One reason this works is because PowerShell commands follow a consistent verb-noun naming convention. With this in mind, you can see all of the commands organized by noun. get-command -CommandType…
Friday Fun: Get-Anniversary
Recently I celebrated a wedding anniversary. Even though I didn’t forget I could have used a little help. So I figured since I’m in PowerShell all the time anyway, it could help. I built a little script to remind me of important dates. Let me walk you through the key steps. First, I’ll define a…
Friday Fun PowerShell Puzzlers
This week’s Friday Fun is a short PowerShell puzzler which I hope you’ll have some fun with and maybe even lead you to look something up and how knows what that might lead to! The following scrambled terms are all PowerShell related. The ones asterisked are PowerShell 3.0 related, but you’ve probably heard about the…
Friday Fun Get Beer List
Well, another Friday and what goes better with it than beer. Of course I should mix in a little PowerShell as well. I live in the Syracuse, NY area and we have a terrific local brewery, Middle Ages Brewing Company. Not only is there a tasting room, but I can also get growler refills. Middle…
Friday Fun A Graphical PowerShell History Picker
One of my favorite features in PowerShell 3.0 is that you can select items in Out-Gridview which will then pipe the object back to the pipeline. One way I’ve been using this is as graphical “picker” for command history. I use Get-History, actually its alias h, all the time. Once I know the history number…
Friday Fun: Job Announcer
Last week I came across some people having fun with the SAPI.SPVoice COM object. This is the object that lets your computer “speak”. If you’ve never played with this, it is very simple to do in PowerShell. The voice quality in Windows 7 and 8 is quite nice, as far as synthetic voices go. $v…
Friday Fun: Scraping the Web with PowerShell v3
We often think about PowerShell v3 as being a management tool for the cloud. One new PowerShell v3 cmdlet that lends substance to this idea is Invoke-WebRequest. This is a handy for retrieving data from a web site resource. It might be a public web site or something on your intranet. For today’s fun I…
Friday Fun – Get Happy Holiday
Today’s Friday Fun is my version of a script originally posted a few years ago by The PowerShell Guy. I’ll list the code but you really need to run it to enjoy it. #requires -version 2.0 #This must be run from the PowerShell console. NOT in the ISE. #this is based on a script originally…
Friday Fun PowerShell Crypto
I’m a big fan of codes, ciphers and secret messages. I obviously am a big PowerShell fan as well. So why not mash these things together? Today’s Friday Fun is a PowerShell module I call PSCode. The module contains a few functions for encoding and decoding text. Now, before you get too excited, these won’t…
Friday Fun: Expand Environmental Variables in PowerShell Strings
This week I was working on a project that involved using the %PATH% environmental variable. The challenge was that I have some entries that look like this: %SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\. When I try to use that path in PowerShell, it complains because it doesn’t expand %SystemRoot%. What I needed was a way to replace it with the…
Friday Fun: Another PowerShell Console Graph
Late last year I posted a demo script to create a horizontal bar graph in the PowerShell console. I liked it and many of you did as well. But I also wanted to be able to create a vertical bar graph, ie one with columns. This is much trickier since you have to tell PowerShell…