The other day fellow PowerShell MVP Adam Bertram published an article about using custom properties with Select-Object. It is a good article in that it gets you thinking about PowerShell in terms of objects and not simple text. But I want to take Adam’s article as a jumping off point and take his ideas a…
Category: PowerShell
Managing PowerShell Functions
Most of you probably know I’ve been using PowerShell since its beta days which now means I have about 10 years worth of PowerShell files. I find it hard to throw anything away. Over this time frame my PowerShell profile scripts have also grown, often loading functions that I’ve come up with. The effect has …
Get Local Group Members Revisited
The other day I posted an article and function that used ADSI and PowerShell to list members of a local group. I had a few people report an unusual error that I couldn’t replicate. During the course of troubleshooting, I made a few changes to the original function to at least better handle the mysterious…
Get Local Group Members with PowerShell
Recently I posted a function to get information about local user accounts. I received a lot of positive feedback so it seemed natural to take this the next step and create a similar function to enumerate or list members of a local group, such as Administrators. The function, Get-LocalGroupMember, also relies on ADSI and is…
Friday Fun: A SysInternals PowerShell Workflow
Over the years I’ve come up with a number of PowerShell tools to download the SysInternals tools to my desktop. And yes, I know that with PowerShell 5 and PowerShellGet I could download and install a SysInternals package. But that assumes the package is current. But that’s not really the point. Instead I want to…
Getting Local User Accounts the PowerShell Way
It seems I’m always seeing requests and problems on getting local user accounts using PowerShell. However, even though we are at PowerShell 5.0, Microsoft has never released a set of cmdlets for managing local user accounts. So many of us have resorted to creating our own tools. I now have my latest iteration of a…
Friday Fun: Improved PowerShell Napping
So I had some fun with my post last week on taking a nap with PowerShell. I got some great feedback on Twitter and a new comments on the blog. My initial effort was a relatively simple PowerShell script which certainly got the job done. But I there were a number of areas where I…
Friday Fun: A PowerShell Nap
I’m hoping that I’m not the only one who feels their butt dragging by mid to late afternoon. Let’s say that’s because we’ve been thundering through the day and by 3:00 we’re a bit out of gas. Yeah, I’ll go with that. I find myself wanting to close my eyes for only a few minutes…
Friday Fun: Number Crunching
Earlier this week I was looking at the GoFundMe website in the midst of debating a new project. One of the considerations I have for sites like this is the expense involved. Certainly I don’t expect this type of service to be free. But I started wondering about what net donations might look like. According…
Testing PowerShell HashTables
So I’ve been watching the PowerShell Toolmaking Fundamentals course on Pluralsight authored by Adam Bertram. You may be surprised that I watch other PowerShell related courses, but I always pick up something I didn’t know about, find a new teaching technique or something else that makes me say, “that was cool.” I have found a…
Updating Open Live Writer Auto Links with PowerShell
I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that I do a fair bit of blogging and writing. This means I am always on the look out for tools and tricks to make the process easier. Recently Scott Hanselmen and others announced a resurrection of the old Microsoft Live Writer tool into an open…
A PowerShell New Year
First off, let me thank all of you for your support and interest in my work this past year. Without it I’d be another old man sitting in his bathrobe talking to himself. I hope I can keep your interest in 2016. To wrap up the year and to bring in the new, i have…
A Festive Christmas Message
The year is winding down and it is getting harder and harder to remain productive. So I’m trying to combine having some fun while still trying to help you learn PowerShell. I wrote a simple PowerShell script that randomly selects a Christmas themed quote and displays in a colorful fashion. When you run the script,…
A Better PowerShell More
In PowerShell, when I have a lot of output, I can use the legacy more.com command to page the results to the screen. Get-Process | more There’s not anything inherently wrong with this approach. Although one drawback is that it doesn’t work in the PowerShell ISE. For that reason alone I decided I needed a…
Computer Certificate tools
In my Pluralsight course on Advanced DSC I used a few functions I wrote to make it easier to work with computer certificates. If you need to encrypt things like passwords in a DSC configuration, you must some type of certificate thumbprint as well as a copy of the certificate. The idea is that you…