I like to have fun with PowerShell, as is hopefully evident with this Friday Fun serious, and today that is especially true. Perhaps you need a quick break from the end of the week grind. Or maybe you want to learn something new about PowerShell. Hopefully today’s fun will meet both requirements. Today’s fun will…
Category: PowerShell
Scary PowerShell
In honor of today’s festivities, at least in the United States, I thought we’d look at some scary PowerShell. I have seen a lot of scary things in blog posts, tweets and forum discussions. Often these scary things are from people just getting started with PowerShell who simply haven’t learned enough yet to know better….
Friday Fun – Take a Chance with PowerShell
Last week I showed you my PowerShell Bingo game. While the game itself might be a fun way to pass the time, the real goal was to teach you some PowerShell techniques and concepts without you realizing it. This week, I thought I’d keep with the gaming theme and take up chance. Specifically let’s roll…
PowerShell Dates, Times and Formats
If you are like me you use date time values constantly in PowerShell. From simply displaying the current date and time in progress message to using different values to create file or folder names. The Get-Date cmdlet has a -Format parameter which you can use. The tricky part is remembering what values to specify. Especially…
Friday Fun – Let’s Play a Game
Today is going to be a lot of fun. A few years ago, back when we were still running PowerShell 2.0 everywhere, I created a module to run a Bingo game in a PowerShell session. I primarily wrote the module as a learning tool for beginners wanting to know more about how to construct a…
The Altaro PowerShell Hyper-V Cookbook
For awhile now I’ve been contributing to the Altaro Hyper-V blog. Many of my articles centered on managing Hyper-V with PowerShell. I’ve gone through my library of management tools and written an eBook around them. All of the PowerShell scripts and functions have been polished up a bit. The eBook briefly discusses how to you…
Friday Fun: Pick Up Milk
Sometimes when working on a PowerShell problem, you might have to come to the conclusion that PowerShell is not the right tool for the job. There are some tasks or applications that simply don’t lend themselves to automation or PowerShell. This isn’t necessarily a limitation in PowerShell, nor would I say it is a deficiency…
Sorting Hash Tables
Over the weekend I received a nice comment from a reader who came across an old post of mine on turning an object into a hash table. He wanted to add a comment but my blog closes comments after a period of time. But I thought it was worth sharing, especially for those of you…
Friday Fun – Does Anyone Really Know What Day It Is?
This week’s Friday Fun I think epitomizes how much I think about PowerShell. But I also think it will serve as a useful learning device if not something you might actually want to use. For some reason, I thought it would be useful to quickly display a monthly calendar in PowerShell. Sure, I could click…
More PowerShell Toolmaking Fun
I am having so much fun making my own PowerShell tools that I just can’t stop. I’ve been using my Get-Commandmetadata function that I wrote about a few weeks ago. A driving force in all of this is to have a toolset that I can use efficiently from the console. Or to put it in…
Friday Fun – A Popup Alternative
In the past I’ve written and presented about different ways to add graphical elements to your PowerShell scripts that don’t rely on Windows Forms or WPF. There’s nothing wrong with those techniques, but they certainly require some expertise and depending on your situation may be overkill. So let’s have some fun today and see how…
Creating Your Own PowerShell Command
Last week, I posted a PowerShell function that you could use as an accelerator to create your own PowerShell tools. My tool takes command metadata from an existing PowerShell cmdlet and gives you the structure to create your own tool wrapped around what is in essence a proxy function. The advantage, besides saving a lot…
Using Optimized Text Files in PowerShell
If you are like many IT Pros that I know, you often rely on text files in your PowerShell work. How many times have you used a text file of computernames with Get-Content and then piped to other PowerShell commands only to have errors. Text files are convenient, but often messy. Your text file might…
Friday Fun: Creating PowerShell Scripts with PowerShell
Sometimes PowerShell really does seem like magic. Especially when you can use it to handle complicated or tedious tasks, such as creating a PowerShell script. I know many an IT Pro who want to script but without having to actually write a script. Well, I’m not sure that is realistic, but you can get pretty…
Making the Shell Work for You Revisited
The other day, I posted an article about creating your own commands to simplify your life at the PowerShell prompt. Most of the time, creating your own wrapper function for an existing PowerShell command isn’t too difficult. Personally, this is the approach I usually take. But PowerShell is all about building blocks and as you…