Subscribe via RSSThis Thursday, February 26, I will be doing a live Twitter chat from 12PM to 1PM EST. The topic is DevOps but I’m sure we’ll talk about PowerShell and automation in general. Use hashtag #DevOpsChat to submit questions and follow along. You can follow me on Twitter as @JeffHicks. I hope you’ll join me.
A PowerShell Weather Service
I’ve been having some fun this week sharing a few tools for getting weather information and forecasts using PowerShell. To complete the story, today I have one more technique. Using PowerShell, you can query a web service for weather information. In simple terms a web service is like an application you can “run” via a…
Getting the Weather Where On Earth
Yesterday I posted a popular article about using Invoke-WebRequest to get weather conditions. That function used the Yahoo web site but really only worked for US cities. So I also cleaned up and revised another set of advanced PowerShell functions (required PowerShell 3) that can retrieve weather information for probably any location on Earth. The…
Baby, It’s Cold Outside
I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but it is downright Arctic here. So I thought I’d polish up my PowerShell function to get weather data. #requires -version 3.0 Function Get-MyWeather { <# .Synopsis Get the weather for a US zip code .Description This command will query the Yahoo weather service and return…
Friday the 13th Fun
It is that time of year again. But instead of being freaked out by Friday the 13th, let’s have a little fun. Here is a collection of PowerShell one-liners, all celebrating 13. And maybe you’ll even pick up something new about PowerShell.
How Hard Are You Working?
Recently in the PowerShell community on Google Plus, there was a discussion about software for creating graphical PowerShell scripts. This is a discussion I’ve seen many times over the years and extends beyond something to create graphical PowerShell tools. Sadly, the root issue of this discussion centers on the mind-set of today’s IT Pro, and…
Friday Fun: Aren’t You Special
If you’ve been following my work for any length of time you know I am constantly going on about “objects in the pipeline”. But PowerShell is flexible enough that you should be able to use it as it meets your needs, provided you know the limitations for whatever path you take. Sometimes you really just…
Friday Fun: Creating Sample Files
Not too long ago I came across a PowerShell snippet, probably via Twitter, that showed how to use a few classes from the System.IO namespace to create dummy files. Sadly I forgot the record where I saw this first mentioned. What I liked about the code I saw was the ability to create a dummy…
Friday Fun: Search Me
I’ve been working on a few revisions and additions to my ISE Scripting Geek module. Even though what I’m about to show you will eventually be available in a future release of that module, I thought I’d share it with you today. One of the things I wanted to be able to do was search…
Friday Fun: Updated ISE Scripting Geek Module
A few years ago I published a module with a number of functions and enhancements for the PowerShell ISE. This ISEScriptingGeek module has remained popular over the last few years. But I wrote it for PowerShell v2. I have also come up with a number of new additions to the ISE that I use to…
In the Neighborhood
As some of you may have heard, I will be presenting in Helsinki, Finland on June 9th as part of the MVP All Stars seminar. I’m very excited about the conference and am looking forward to spreading the word about PowerShell to a new group of IT professionals. But it is a long trip from…
On the Road in 2015
As 2014 draws to a close it is time to start planning for 2015. Naturally it is still early but I wanted to share with you some of my plans for next year. As always I hope to get out as much as I can next year to talk about PowerShell and demonstrate how it…
Friday Fun: Another Christmas Prompt
In last week’s Friday Fun post, I shared with you a PowerShell prompt that would display a festive Christmas countdown clock. This week I have another holiday related prompt function. This one is pretty straight forward and is not that much different from the default PowerShell prompt function. Function Prompt { #only change background color…
Why You Should Attend the PowerShell Summit
As you might be aware, registration is open for the PowerShell Summit North America 2015 to be help April 20-22, 2015 on the Microsoft campus in Charlotte, NC. You may be wondering why you should attend or even if you should attend. To begin, take a few minutes to read the Summit 2015 Education brochure….
Friday Fun Christmas Countdown Prompt
It’s that time of year again where PowerShell can make all your wishes come true. Ok, maybe that’s a bit much, but PowerShell is the gift that keeps giving all year long. Again, maybe too much. How about this? Here’s a revised version of my Christmas countdown prompt. I’ve posted this in the past. But…