Once you have some basic PowerShell experience I think you will begin looking for all sorts of ways to use PowerShell. Although one of the biggest obstacles for many IT Pros is the thought of having to type everything. Certainly, PowerShell has a number of features to mitigate this, often misperceived, burden such as tab…
Category: PowerShell
Friday Fun: Read Me a Story
A few days ago, someone on Twitter humorously lamented the fact that I expected them to actually read a blog post. After the laughter subsided I thought, well why does he have to? Perhaps I can make it easier for him. Plus I needed something fun for today. So I put together a PowerShell function…
Tracking Your Day with PowerShell
Not too long ago, I received an email with a snippet of PowerShell code and a request for assistance. The code snippet used a little .NET code to retrieve the process for the currently active window. The goal was to have a PowerShell script run, keeping track of how long a given window was active….
Friday Fun Text to HTML
I love being able to create HTML documents from PowerShell commands. The Convertto-HTML cmdlet will happily turn any object into an HTML table using whatever properties you specify. Plus you can do all sorts of fancy things such as embedding a style sheet in the header, creating HTML fragments and inserting additional HTML elements. Today’s…
A Timely PowerShell Prompt
During the course of writing a few scripts that refresh a specific part of the console, such as the recent Read-Host alternative, I realized that flashing colors wasn’t always necessary. The fact that I could update the same space on the screen meant I could write the same content with minor changes and it would…
More Flashing Fun
I received a lot of interest in my Invoke-Flasher script. One comment I received on Twitter was for a way to use it interactively in a script. In essence, he wanted a flashing Read-Host so I took my original concept and tweaked it until I came up with a Read-Host alternative I simply call Read-Host2….
Look at Me!
Last week I posted some ideas on how to add notifications to your scripts. Those ideas were variations on the old school “Press any key to continue” prompt that I assume many of you are familiar with. Most of those concepts should work for you, but they assume you looking at the PowerShell window. I…
You wanted it…PowerShell Summit Europe
For the longest time members of the PowerShell Community clamored for a European edition of the PowerShell Summit. This is an intense, 3 day conference on all things PowerShell, led by members of the PowerShell community as well as members of the PowerShell team from Microsoft. The conference is intentionally small so that you can…
Press PowerShell Pause to Continue
Everyone once in a while I come across a PowerShell script that behaves like an old-fashioned batch file. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but often these types of scripts put in a pause at the end of script so you can see that it finished. You might have seen a command like this…
Friday Fun Reverse PowerShell
These Friday Fun posts are not supposed to be practical, yet hopefully still entertaining and educational. Today’s article is no exception but I ‘ll be you’ll try it at least once. And you’ll maybe even learn something about PowerShell that perhaps you didn’t know before. It all starts with a string. We use strings all…
Friday Fun: A Random PowerShell Console
This week I thought we’d have a little fun with the PowerShell console and maybe pick up a few scripting techniques along the way. Today I have a function that changes the foreground and background colors of your PowerShell console to random values. But because you might want to go back to your original settings…
So you need to write a PowerShell script
So…you have decided to write a PowerShell script or have at least identified a need. What do you do first? If you say “Google or Bing”, I’d say you are wrong. In my opinion, when you are developing a PowerShell script, searching for an existing script is not the first step. Sure, you will likely…
SQL Database Reports with PowerShell
Last year I wrote an article for SQL Server Pro called PowerShell in SQL Server. In the article I provided an introduction to using PowerShell and the SQL Server module to do perform some typical management tasks. I think this type of information is especially important for those of you who have to manage a…
More PowerShell Laziness
A few days ago I posted an article on using Update-TypeData to provide shortcuts to object properties. These shortcuts might save a few keystrokes typing, especially if you use tab completion. They can also give you more meaningful output. But you can take this even further and save yourself even more typing. How many of…
PowerShell for the Lazy IT Pro
PowerShell is a great enabler for those of us who don’t like to work any harder than we have to. Well, maybe I should say, “for those of us who like to work more efficiently.” PowerShell already comes loaded with a number of shortcuts and tricks for getting more done with less effort. Something that…