On my last Friday Fun, I posted an article about using Internet Explorer as a trace window. The idea was to put debug or trace messages in a separate application. I received a comment on the post that suggested I could do a similar thing using the Debug View utility from Sysinternals. This application is…
Category: Scripting
Friday Fun: Create a PowerShell Trace Window
Way back in the day, it was all VBScript and HTAs for me. I built a number of HTA tools for other people to use. As you might expect they didn’t always work and troubleshooting something I couldn’t see was difficult. So I came up with a solution to use an Internet Explorer window as…
Friday Fun: 50 Shades of PowerShell HTML Reports
I’ve been working on a project for a client that includes creating an HTML report, generated by PowerShell. I originally thought I would include a certain feature but decided against it. However, this is so cool I thought I’d share it with you as a Friday Fun article. I’ve done alot this year with some…
Out with the Windows.old
Over the last few days I’ve started the process of upgrading my test virtual machines to Windows Server 2012 R2, or in the case of my mini Hyper-V server, to the final bits of Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. In many cases I had been running the preview bits. I know I probably should have…
Runspaces, Remoting and Workflow, Oh My!
The other day on Twitter I saw a message about new script in the Microsoft Script Center on getting remote event logs with WMI. So I took a look at the script. If you take a minute to look at the script you’ll quickly realize this is not a script for beginners. My initial thought…
Resolving SIDs with WMI, WSMAN and PowerShell
In the world of Windows, an account SID can be a very enigmatic thing. Who is S-1-5-21-2250542124-3280448597-2353175939-1019? Fortunately, many applications, such as the event log viewer resolve the SID to an account name. The downside, is that when you are accessing that same type of information from PowerShell, you end up with the “raw’ SID….
Techmentor Las Vegas 2013 Session Materials
I had a terrific time at Techmentor last week in Las Vegas. I did 2 3-hour sessions. The longer sessions are intended to allow speakers time to go deeper into content and offer more detailed coverage than what you might get at a conference like TechEd. From my informal survey of attendees, many people enjoyed…
Friday Fun: Out-ConditionalColor
Last week I posted a Friday Fun article on parsing results from Invoke-Webrequest and displaying matching strings in color so that the book titles I’m interested in stand out. But the more I thought about it I realized I should take this a step further. The problem with Write-Host is that it doesn’t write anything…
Friday Fun Color My Web
Awhile ago I posted an article demonstrating using Invoke-Webrequest which is part of PowerShell 3.0. I used the page at Manning.com to display the Print and MEAP bestsellers. By the way, thanks to all of you who keep making PowerShell books popular. My original script simply wrote the results to the screen. But I decided…
A Better PowerShell Get Scheduled Job Results
Yesterday I posted a quick update on my code to get the most recent scheduled job result in PowerShell. I had been using a simple script. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I really did need to turn it into a function with more flexibility. When creating a PowerShell based…
Friday Fun: Get Day of the Year with PowerShell
Earlier this week I was having some fun with @EnergizedTech on Twitter, playing around with dates in PowerShell. I’m not even sure where we started but the experience got me thinking and it’s Friday so let’s have some fun. While I can easily find out what the day of the year is for a given…
Creating Styling HTML Reports with PowerShell
Last month I did an updated version of my presentation on creating styling HTML reports in Windows PowerShell. This presentation was for the PowerShell virtual chapter of SQL PASS. As such, I came up with some SQL related demonstrations and fine tuned some demos from earlier presentations. You can download a zip file with a…
Friday Fun: Quote of the Day Revised
This week TrainSignal has been running a contest to celebrate my new PowerShell 3.0 course . All you have to do to win is enter some off-the-wall, silly or non-production use of PowerShell. I’ve posted a few examples on the TrainSignal blog this week. These Friday Fun posts I write also follow the same idea….
MSDevWNY PowerShell Advanced Functions
Last night I presented for the MSDevWNY user group in the Buffalo, NY area. They were an interested and enthusiastic audience and I think we could have spent another few hours talking about PowerShell. My presentation was one I’ve given before on Advanced PowerShell functions. I promised the group a copy of my slides and…
Friday Fun: It’s PowerShell, Baby!
The other day I received an email looking for guidance on using Invoke-Webrequest to pull data from a table on a web page. Specifically, he wanted to get the list of popular baby names from http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html. I gave him some quick tips but figured this would also be another teaching opportunity. Using Invoke-Webrequest with PowerShell…