Subscribe via RSSDon Jones and I are often asked about our Month of Lunches books and when we are going to update them. This question seems to pop up more frequently now that Windows 10 is released to the wild and more of you are seeing PowerShell 5.0 for the first time. The short answer is no…
Friday Fun: Tickle Me PowerShell!
I work at home for myself which means I have to act as my own assistant, reminding me of important events and tasks. And sometimes I need a little help. So why not use PowerShell? In the past I’ve used and written about using a background job to wait until a certain number of minutes…
Measuring Folders with PowerShell One More Time
I know I just posted an update to my Measure-Folder function but I couldn’t help myself and now I have an update to the update. Part of the update came as the result of a comment asking about formatting results to a certain number of decimal places. I typically the Round() method from the Math…
Creating a Hyper-V VM Memory Report
I use Hyper-V to run my lab environment. Since I work at home I don’t have access to a “real” production network so I have to make do with a virtualized environment. Given budgetary constraints I also don’t have a lot of high end hardware with endless amount of RAM and storage. So I often…
Measure that Folder with PowerShell Revisited
Last year I posted a PowerShell function to measure the size of a folder. I recently had a need to use it again, and realized it needed a few tweaks. By default, the original version recursively searched through all subfolders. But there may be situations where you only want to measure the top level folder,…
Simulating a PowerShell Demo
A number of years ago I published my version of a Start-Demo script. In my version, I can create a text file with all of the commands I want to run. It might look like this: Get-Date get-ciminstance win32_logicaldisk | select DeviceID,Size,Freespace :: get-service | where {$_.status -eq ‘running’} | Select Name,Status | Format-Table -autosize…
SQL Database Report Revised
Last year I wrote an article that explained how to use the SQLSERVER PSDrive to create an HTML report highlighting some server and database information. If you want a refresher you can find that article here. In short, you can install the SQL Server PowerShell module on your client desktop and use it to manage…
VMDK to VHDX PDQ
I have a very old VMware ESXi server that has outlived its useful life. The hardware is at least 5 years old and my VMware license has expired. I can still bring up the server and see the virtual machines, but that’s about it. I still keep the box so I can run the PowerCLI…
Friday Fun: A Better PSEdit
In the PowerShell ISE, there is a built-in function called PSEdit. You can use this function to easily load a file in to the ISE directly from the ISE command prompt. Psedit c:\scripts\myscript.ps1 You can also load multiple files, but not as easily as you might like. I find myself wanting to do this: As…
Converting Timespans to Repetition Patterns
Over on Petri.com, I’ve recently published a followup article about creating daily or weekly scheduled PowerShell jobs that support a repetition interval. The short answer is to use the Scheduled Tasks cmdlets. In the Petri article I talk about needing to use a special string format for the timespan. It is documented on MSDN. It…
Friday Fun: A PowerShell Macro
Today’s Friday Fun is a little different in that it showcases two things I use almost every day: Microsoft Word and PowerShell. I am writing new articles and material almost daily and of course very often the content is PowerShell related. Usually I use the blog post template in Word to make it easier to…
Friday Fun: I Can Run that Command in 3 Letters
If you have been using PowerShell for any length of time, I’m sure you are familiar with aliases. An alias is an alternative name to a PowerShell cmdlet. They are intended to serve as transition aids (like dir and ls) and as a means to keep interactive typing to a minimum. Although with tab completion,…
Chicago – My Kind of Town
I grew up in Northwest Indiana so naturally Chicago played a big role. I love Chicago and if I had to pick a major city to live, this would be it. So I’m very excited to be heading there for Ignite. I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends and meet some new ones….
PowerShell for Newbies
As you might imagine I get a lot of questions about how to get started with PowerShell, especially what books and material they can get their hands on. While I earn living creating books, training videos and offering live training, I’m aware that many people are on a budget so if you are looking for…
PowerShell Play by Play with Don Jones
I’m very excited to tell you about this latest effort from Pluralsight. A few months ago I sat down with Don Jones, and we recorded a live course on getting started with PowerShell. The finished product has finally been released. Over the course of about an hour we talk about taking an idea or task…