I just found out I will be presenting at the PowerShell Deep Dive April 18-19 that is part of TEC 2011. This promises to be THE PowerShell event everyone has been waiting for. I’ll be presenting on format and type extensions. Mastering Format and Type Extensions Windows PowerShell is designed with administrators in mind. The…
Category: Scripting
Join Me in Atlanta for TechEd 2011
I’m very excited to be presenting at Microsoft TechEd North America 2011, this year in Atlanta, GA. I’ll be presenting two breakout sessions and will likely be there most of the week so there will be plenty of time to connect with people. I have what I hope are some very interesting sessions.
Set File Encoding
For most people, when you create a script in PowerShell you generally don’t worry too much about how it is encoded. Most everything you encounter in PowerShell uses Unicode files. But when sharing files sometimes this causes problems. For example, when I post a script for download here, I need to make sure it is…
Friday Fun – Snappy Shortcuts
In one of my recent Prof. PowerShell columns, I wrote about using the Wscript.Shell VBScript object in PowerShell to retrieve special folder paths. Another handy trick is the ability to create shortcut links to either file or web resources. Let me show you how to accomplish this in PowerShell and why you might want to.
PowerShell Regular Expressions by the Numbers
I’ve been working on something the last week that brought me back into sometimes frightening world of regular expressions. But as the saying goes, we only fear what we don’t understand. So a little knowledge can be a wonderful thing. In this particular situation I was looking for a regular expression to determine if a…
Friday Fun: Let’s Play Bingo!
Today Campers we’re playing Bingo. Or at least getting ready to. This week I have some PowerShell code that will create a BINGO card. For those of you outside of North America you might need to take a crash course on this game. But even if you don’t play, this article will demonstrate some useful…
We Pause a Moment
Most of the time when running a PowerShell script or series of commands you want to blast your way through. But there might be times where you want to pause script execution. Perhaps to display an informational message or to simply pace execution. In my work as a trainer and speaker I often use the…
Convert History to Script
Whenever I teach or speak about PowerShell, a recurring mantra is that there is no difference between running a PowerShell script and executing commands interactively in the shell, except that it saves you typing. You can create a PowerShell script by simply copying and pasting commands from the shell into a .PS1 text file. This…
More WMI Dates – Win32Product InstallDate
I’ve written in the past about converting obtuse WMI datetime formats into more user friendly formats. The other day via Twitter I got a question about the InstallDate property that comes from the Win32_Product class. This property has a different format, than what I’ve written about previously. And while I think the format is easy…
Join Me in Orlando
I will be presenting 3 sessions at Techmentor Orlando 2011. The conference runs March 14-18, 2011 at the Disney Yacht Club. My sessions are all on Wednesday March 16. In addition to all the other fabulous material at the conference I will be presenting the following:
Out-CompressedFile
I’m not sure where this idea came from, but I thought it might be nice to redirect output to a compressed text file. I know disk space is cheap these days but perhaps you’re running PowerShell 2.0 on an older platform and you want to save output from a command that will generate a ton…
Friday Fun – The Kitchen Sink Prompt
On my last Friday Fun post on PowerShell prompts, I got a terrific comment from Bart Vandyck about his prompt which has just about everything you would want. I too have a “kitchen sink” prompt, that is to say, one with the proverbial “everything but the kitchen sink”. Or you might consider this an extreme…
Friday Fun – More Prompts
Not too long ago I offered up a tasting of PowerShell prompts 3 ways. My first offering were variations on displaying the current date and time. But a PowerShell prompt can do much more. For today’s Friday Fun I present a duo of of calculating prompts.
Export Registry
Over the last week or so I’ve posted some functions for testing whether a given registry item exists or not, or even validating its value. To round this out, today I have an advanced function that makes it easier to export parts of the registry on the local computer.
Test Registry Item Revisited
I got some nice feedback on my original Test-RegistryItem function. I had been mulling some enhancements anyway and now have a more robust version that looks at individual values, accepts pipelined input and more The new version now lets you test if a given registry item exists as well as if the value meets some…