Last week I gave two presentations at the European edition of the PowerShell Summit held in beautiful Stockholm, Sweden. If you weren’t able to attend, you can still enjoy the sessions because everything was recorded. Session recordings for the entire conference can be found on PowerShell.org’s YouTube channel. I thought I would post something here…
Category: PowerShell
For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow
By now I’m assuming most of you have seen or heard the news that Jeffrey Snover has been promoted for the last time and is now a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. I want to add my congratulations and adulation to the thundering masses of PowerShell professionals. I always thought his previous position as a Distinguished…
Updated PowerShell Formatting Functions
Last year I posted an article and a set of PowerShell functions to make it easier to format values. For some reason, I decided to revisit the functions and ended up revising and extending them. I modified Format-Value so that you can format a number as a currency or a number. Format-Value help (Image Credit:…
Veeam Whiteboard and PowerShell
I’ll be live next week talking about PowerShell principles and concepts as part of the Veeam Whiteboard series. Should be a lot of fun. I hope you’ll catch it live or on demand. You can learn more and register for free at http://www.veeam.com/veeamlive/powershell-paradigm-principles-practice.html
Teeing Up to the Clipboard
Because I spend a great part of my day creating PowerShell related content, I often need to copy command output from a PowerShell session. The quick and dirty solution is to pipe my expression to the Clip.exe command line utility. get-service | where { $_.status -eq ‘running’} | clip This works in both the console…
An Improved Get-Verb Command
A recommended best practice for PowerShell scripting, especially when developing functions, is to follow the standard Verb-Noun naming convention. The Verb should be a value from the list of approved .NET verbs. The easy way to see that list is with the Get-Verb cmdlet. The result will also indicate the verb group or category like…
Updating Month of Lunches
Don Jones and I are often asked about our Month of Lunches books and when we are going to update them. This question seems to pop up more frequently now that Windows 10 is released to the wild and more of you are seeing PowerShell 5.0 for the first time. The short answer is no…
Friday Fun: Tickle Me PowerShell!
I work at home for myself which means I have to act as my own assistant, reminding me of important events and tasks. And sometimes I need a little help. So why not use PowerShell? In the past I’ve used and written about using a background job to wait until a certain number of minutes…
Measuring Folders with PowerShell One More Time
I know I just posted an update to my Measure-Folder function but I couldn’t help myself and now I have an update to the update. Part of the update came as the result of a comment asking about formatting results to a certain number of decimal places. I typically the Round() method from the Math…
Creating a Hyper-V VM Memory Report
I use Hyper-V to run my lab environment. Since I work at home I don’t have access to a “real” production network so I have to make do with a virtualized environment. Given budgetary constraints I also don’t have a lot of high end hardware with endless amount of RAM and storage. So I often…
Measure that Folder with PowerShell Revisited
Last year I posted a PowerShell function to measure the size of a folder. I recently had a need to use it again, and realized it needed a few tweaks. By default, the original version recursively searched through all subfolders. But there may be situations where you only want to measure the top level folder,…
Simulating a PowerShell Demo
A number of years ago I published my version of a Start-Demo script. In my version, I can create a text file with all of the commands I want to run. It might look like this: Get-Date get-ciminstance win32_logicaldisk | select DeviceID,Size,Freespace :: get-service | where {$_.status -eq ‘running’} | Select Name,Status | Format-Table -autosize…
SQL Database Report Revised
Last year I wrote an article that explained how to use the SQLSERVER PSDrive to create an HTML report highlighting some server and database information. If you want a refresher you can find that article here. In short, you can install the SQL Server PowerShell module on your client desktop and use it to manage…
VMDK to VHDX PDQ
I have a very old VMware ESXi server that has outlived its useful life. The hardware is at least 5 years old and my VMware license has expired. I can still bring up the server and see the virtual machines, but that’s about it. I still keep the box so I can run the PowerCLI…
Converting Timespans to Repetition Patterns
Over on Petri.com, I’ve recently published a followup article about creating daily or weekly scheduled PowerShell jobs that support a repetition interval. The short answer is to use the Scheduled Tasks cmdlets. In the Petri article I talk about needing to use a special string format for the timespan. It is documented on MSDN. It…