I’ve been doing some work lately involving the registry and Windows PowerShell. One of the tasks was to create new registry keys and entries. But because I wanted to some robustness, I wanted a way to verify if a given key or entry already existed.
Category: Scripting
New Event Report
For a number of years I wrote the popular Mr. Roboto column for REDMOND magazine. When I first started the column, many of my scripts were written in VBScript. Then as PowerShell came along that became the preferred tool. Over time I realized there were some VBScripts that could be rewritten and even improved using…
Friday Fun Playing with Strings
While I was busy working, it turned into Friday which means time for a little PowerShell fun. I can’t say you’ll find any deep, meaningful, production use from today’s post, but you might pick up a few techniques, which is really the point. Today we’re going to have some fun with strings and arrays.
PowerShell ISE New Function
Yesterday I showed how to add a menu choice to the PowerShell ISE to insert the current date and time. Today I have something even better. At least it’s something I’ve needed for awhile. I write a lot of advanced functions in PowerShell. I’m often cutting and pasting from previous scripts and generally not being…
PowerShell Is Not Omnipotent
Last week I was working on a problem in a PowerShell forum. The admin was having problems getting Add-Computer to work. After a bit of “try this/try that” something became clear, and it’s something that is easy to overlook. Especially when we get lulled into thinking PowerShell is omnipotent.
PowerShell: The Ultimate Ginsu Knife
You don’t have to stay up until the wee hours of the morning looking for an amazing tool that slices and dices like the famed Ginsu Knife. Are you looking for a way to speed up your work? Are you tired of the same old routine? Would you be surprised that your answer is already…
Get Some Style
Windows PowerShell has many ways to present and store information. You can display it to the screen, write it to a file, send it to a printer, create an CSV or XML file or even a pretty HTML report. The ConvertTo-HTML cmdlet underwent a significant facelift for v2.0 and is a popular cmdlet. But I…
New-PSDriveHere
I spend a lot of time, as you might expect, at a PowerShell prompt. Especially when training, presenting or doing demonstrations. Very often I’m in a folder with a long path like PS C:\users\jeff\Documents\Enterprise Mgmt Webinar. That takes up a lot of screen real estate and can be distracting. What I often will do is…
PowerShell Background Jobs at CNY Developer Group
I will be presenting a talk on PowerShell background jobs at the September meeting of the CNY Developer Group on September 8, 2010 at 6:00PM. The group meets at the New Horizons office in DeWitt, NY. I hope you’ll consider coming. You read an abstract and register (free) at http://www.cnydevelopers.net/.
Pipelines, Consoles and Hosts
I continue to come across a particular topic in discussion forums that causes many PowerShell beginners a lot of headaches and more than a little frustration. I know I’ve written about this before and I’m sure I’ll cover it again, but when writing anything in PowerShell that you see in the PowerShell console, you have…
Friday the 13 Script Blocks
In celebration of Friday the 13th and to help ward off any triskaidekaphobia I thought I’d offer up 13 PowerShell scriptblocks. These are scriptblocks that might solve a legitimate business need like finding how long a server has been running to the more mercurial such as how many hours before I can go home. A…
Windows Update Module
I don’t have a large environment to manage, but I do have a number of test boxes I try to keep up date using Windows Software Update Server (WSUS). Occasionally I’ve needed to manage things client-side. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of good tools, and nothing PowerShell-related that I’ve found so I wrote my own….
Mr. Roboto Scripts
I'm slowly trying to revise my main web site. The original site had a script library page where all of my old Mr. Roboto scripts resided for download. Unfortunately, in many of the online Mr. Roboto articles the link they provided doesn't work now. So if you are looking for my old scripts, use this…
WBADMIN Demo
Earlier this year I wrote an article for REDMOND Magazine about the new backup features in Windows Server 2008 R2. I’m not going to re-hash the article here except to say it includes some sample scripts on using the WBADMIN command line tool. One of the scripts is an old-school batch file. The batch file…
PowerShell Weather Module
I first wrote a Windows PowerShell function several years ago to retrieve weather information via Yahoo’s weather service. I’ve been itching to rewrite it and finally found some time over the weekend. Turns out it’s a good thing I did because the method I had been using to query the Yahoo web service has been…