Today’s Friday Fun offers a way for you to graphically interact with your PowerShell scripts and functions without resorting to a lot of complex Winform scripting. I have a function that you can use to display an interactive message box complete with buttons like Yes, No or Cancel. You can either use the message box…
Category: PowerShell v2.0
PowerShell Deep Dive Formatting and Extensions
I just found out I will be presenting at the PowerShell Deep Dive April 18-19 that is part of TEC 2011. This promises to be THE PowerShell event everyone has been waiting for. I’ll be presenting on format and type extensions. Mastering Format and Type Extensions Windows PowerShell is designed with administrators in mind. The…
Importing and Exporting Registry Items
A while ago I posted a function to export registry items to either a CSV or XML file. Recently I had a question on Twitter about importing, which I assumed meant from my exported file. The import is actually pretty easy as I’ll show you, although it did require a change to the original Export-Registry…
We Pause a Moment
Most of the time when running a PowerShell script or series of commands you want to blast your way through. But there might be times where you want to pause script execution. Perhaps to display an informational message or to simply pace execution. In my work as a trainer and speaker I often use the…
More WMI Dates – Win32Product InstallDate
I’ve written in the past about converting obtuse WMI datetime formats into more user friendly formats. The other day via Twitter I got a question about the InstallDate property that comes from the Win32_Product class. This property has a different format, than what I’ve written about previously. And while I think the format is easy…
TechEd Berlin Paradigm Shift Demos
I had a great time in Berlin at TechEd and want to thank everybody who came to my presentation. I hope you found it valuable and worth your time. As promised, you can download my demo files here. The .txt files are my demo files which are really just a list of PowerShell commands. They…
Friday Fun Quote of the Day
For this week’s Friday Fun post, I have another idea on how to brighten your PowerShell console. The concept of a message of the day or quote of the day in computing goes way back to the dark ages (ie before PowerShell). I thought it might be fun to see what we could do with…
Friday Fun – The Kitchen Sink Prompt
On my last Friday Fun post on PowerShell prompts, I got a terrific comment from Bart Vandyck about his prompt which has just about everything you would want. I too have a “kitchen sink” prompt, that is to say, one with the proverbial “everything but the kitchen sink”. Or you might consider this an extreme…
Friday Fun – More Prompts
Not too long ago I offered up a tasting of PowerShell prompts 3 ways. My first offering were variations on displaying the current date and time. But a PowerShell prompt can do much more. For today’s Friday Fun I present a duo of of calculating prompts.
Export Registry
Over the last week or so I’ve posted some functions for testing whether a given registry item exists or not, or even validating its value. To round this out, today I have an advanced function that makes it easier to export parts of the registry on the local computer.
New Event Report
For a number of years I wrote the popular Mr. Roboto column for REDMOND magazine. When I first started the column, many of my scripts were written in VBScript. Then as PowerShell came along that became the preferred tool. Over time I realized there were some VBScripts that could be rewritten and even improved using…
Friday Fun Playing with Strings
While I was busy working, it turned into Friday which means time for a little PowerShell fun. I can’t say you’ll find any deep, meaningful, production use from today’s post, but you might pick up a few techniques, which is really the point. Today we’re going to have some fun with strings and arrays.
PowerShell ISE New Function
Yesterday I showed how to add a menu choice to the PowerShell ISE to insert the current date and time. Today I have something even better. At least it’s something I’ve needed for awhile. I write a lot of advanced functions in PowerShell. I’m often cutting and pasting from previous scripts and generally not being…
PowerShell ISE Insert DateTime
I still don’t leverage the PowerShell Integrated Script Editor (ISE) as much as I should. But after reading a few recent entries from The Scripting Guys on inserting help and headers into a script, I thought I’d dig in a little more. I’ve a few things to share but today I want to show you…
Understanding PowerShell Background Jobs
Last night I spoke to the CNY .NET Developers Group about background jobs in Windows PowerShell. Even though the audience was primarily developers, I discussed jobs from an administrator’s perspective, that is, using cmdlets. The job feature in PowerShell 2.0 is pretty amazing and you don’t need any programming skills.