Subscribe via RSSWell another PowerShell Summit has come and gone. Although now we’re all grown up and are now the PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit. This year’s event was sold out and featured speakers from around the world as well as many people from Microsoft. In fact this is the only event where you can interact personally…
The Power of Custom Properties
The other day fellow PowerShell MVP Adam Bertram published an article about using custom properties with Select-Object. It is a good article in that it gets you thinking about PowerShell in terms of objects and not simple text. But I want to take Adam’s article as a jumping off point and take his ideas a…
Managing PowerShell Functions
Most of you probably know I’ve been using PowerShell since its beta days which now means I have about 10 years worth of PowerShell files. I find it hard to throw anything away. Over this time frame my PowerShell profile scripts have also grown, often loading functions that I’ve come up with. The effect has …
Friday Fun: Tweaking the PowerShell ISE
Today’s fun is still PowerShell related, but instead of something in the console, we’ll have some fun with the PowerShell ISE. One of the things I love about the PowerShell ISE is that you can customize it and extend it. My ISE Scripting Geek project is an example. But today I have a simple example…
Get Local Group Members Revisited
The other day I posted an article and function that used ADSI and PowerShell to list members of a local group. I had a few people report an unusual error that I couldn’t replicate. During the course of troubleshooting, I made a few changes to the original function to at least better handle the mysterious…
Get Local Group Members with PowerShell
Recently I posted a function to get information about local user accounts. I received a lot of positive feedback so it seemed natural to take this the next step and create a similar function to enumerate or list members of a local group, such as Administrators. The function, Get-LocalGroupMember, also relies on ADSI and is…
Friday Fun: A SysInternals PowerShell Workflow
Over the years I’ve come up with a number of PowerShell tools to download the SysInternals tools to my desktop. And yes, I know that with PowerShell 5 and PowerShellGet I could download and install a SysInternals package. But that assumes the package is current. But that’s not really the point. Instead I want to…
Getting Local User Accounts the PowerShell Way
It seems I’m always seeing requests and problems on getting local user accounts using PowerShell. However, even though we are at PowerShell 5.0, Microsoft has never released a set of cmdlets for managing local user accounts. So many of us have resorted to creating our own tools. I now have my latest iteration of a…
More Power is on the way
For the past several months, I’ve been debating about what to do for the next iteration of my Hyper-V network. I rely on it heavily for my writing, course-ware development, and training. For awhile now I’ve been traveling with a Yoga 2 Pro which runs a few virtual machines, and a Gigabyte Brix unit with…
Friday Fun: Improved PowerShell Napping
So I had some fun with my post last week on taking a nap with PowerShell. I got some great feedback on Twitter and a new comments on the blog. My initial effort was a relatively simple PowerShell script which certainly got the job done. But I there were a number of areas where I…
Friday Fun: A PowerShell Nap
I’m hoping that I’m not the only one who feels their butt dragging by mid to late afternoon. Let’s say that’s because we’ve been thundering through the day and by 3:00 we’re a bit out of gas. Yeah, I’ll go with that. I find myself wanting to close my eyes for only a few minutes…
Friday Fun: Number Crunching
Earlier this week I was looking at the GoFundMe website in the midst of debating a new project. One of the considerations I have for sites like this is the expense involved. Certainly I don’t expect this type of service to be free. But I started wondering about what net donations might look like. According…
Testing PowerShell HashTables
So I’ve been watching the PowerShell Toolmaking Fundamentals course on Pluralsight authored by Adam Bertram. You may be surprised that I watch other PowerShell related courses, but I always pick up something I didn’t know about, find a new teaching technique or something else that makes me say, “that was cool.” I have found a…
This Year is for You
If you’ve been following my work for any length of time, you probably have a pretty good idea of what kind of guy I am, the things I am interested in and what matters to me. I’m assuming you’ve seen me at a conference, read one of my books or articles, or follow me on Twitter….
Updating Open Live Writer Auto Links with PowerShell
I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that I do a fair bit of blogging and writing. This means I am always on the look out for tools and tricks to make the process easier. Recently Scott Hanselmen and others announced a resurrection of the old Microsoft Live Writer tool into an open…