As I continue to work on the 2nd edition of Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell: TFM, I find situations where I need a tool to get information out of Windows PowerShell. For example, the cmdlets in the Microsoft Active Directory module have a lot of parameters and I wanted to know some specifics. Now…
Category: Scripting
Export-Function
I love that you can do so much with PowerShell on the fly. For example, I don’t need to launch a script editor to create a PowerShell function. I can do it right from the command prompt. PS C:\> function tm {(get-date).ToLongTimeString()} PS C:\> tm 12:41:27 PM As long as my PowerShell session is open,…
This Old Script
I’m very slowly revising my main web site. The upshot for now is that there is no direct link to my old script library. Many of my Mr. Roboto tools can be found on this page. Until I can finish the upgrade project, you can use this link, http://www.jdhitsolutions.com/scripts.htm to take you directly to the…
Out-Clip
I’ve started working on the 2nd edition of Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell: TFM. As with almost all of my writing projects it will be full of PowerShell code examples. In the past I’ve always relied on a manual copy and paste to add content to the manuscript. The PowerShell Community Extensions made this…
Objects are the answer
As I usually do, I was helping out in the forums at ScriptingAnswers.com. A member had several variables that he wanted to show as a group. As is almost always the case, the answer in PowerShell is object. I talk about this all the time in classes, conferences and online chitchat. Let me offer up…
New Book Project – Reviewers Needed
While at Microsoft TechEd, I signed the paperwork to write a second edition of Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell: TFM for SAPIEN Press. It’s hard to believe so much has happened since that book hit the shelves in less than 2 years. The 2nd edition will continue to include coverage of Quest Software’s PowerShell…
TechEd 2010 VBScript to PowerShell
Last week I posted my demo slides as well as my demo videos. As promised, I’ve gone through and expanded a bit on my original slide deck. TechEdNA-2010-Hicks-ParadigmShift is a 3MB PDF of my expanded PowerPoint slide deck. If you have any questions about the content or what it takes to get your head from…
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit PowerShell Wizard
During the last TechMentor conference in Orlando, deployment MVP and guru (I want to call her a deployment diva but I don’t want people to get the wrong idea. Think “diva” in the star sense without the ego and entourage,) Rhonda Layfield asked me to look at some PowerShell code. She was trying to make…
Get Parent Process
Recently I helping out on a post in the forums at ScriptingAnswers.com. The question centered around identifying processes on a computer and their parent process. There are many ways you could slice and dice this problem using WMI and Get-WmiObject. Getting the parent process ID is pretty simple, but going backwards from there to identify…
Join Object
Related to some of the WMI stuff I’ve been working on lately is the idea of melding or joining objects. This comes about because I often see forum posts from administrators looking to collect information from different WMI classes but present it as a single object. One way you might accomplish this is to create…
Select WMI
I’ve been helping out on some WMI and PowerShell issues in the forums at ScriptingAnswers.com. As I was working on a problem I ended up taking a slight detour to address an issue that has always bugged me. When I run a command like this: get-wmiobject -query “Select Name,Description,Disabled from Win32_UserAccount” PowerShell wants to return…
Bool vs Switch
I have to say I’m generally impressed with the quality of submissions to this year’s Scripting Games. But there is a recurring concept that some people are using and I think there’s a better way. Some contestants are defining function or script parameters as booleans. But I believe they really should be using the [switch]…
Verbose Variations
While I’ve been judging entries in the 2010 Scripting Games, I’ve noticed a few things that I thought I would comment on here. In longer and complicated scripts, I’ve always suggested script developers provide some sort of feedback about what the script is doing. Typically this is done with Write-Host, but there are several ways…
PowerShell vs Jesus
Ok. I decided it’s time I finally weigh in on this with more than 140 characters. I’m sure you’ve seen, in forums, Twitter and other social media comparisons between Windows PowerShell and some other shell of choice. Typically the “other” shell is LInux based and the comparison is thrown down as a challenge, “Which is…
Hey, are you awake?
As many of you know, one of the things I’m doing these days is helping run The Experts Community web site. As such I need to make sure it is up and running. I also like to make sure my blog and a few other sites are responding to HTTP requests. To meet this need…