Last week I came across some people having fun with the SAPI.SPVoice COM object. This is the object that lets your computer “speak”. If you’ve never played with this, it is very simple to do in PowerShell. The voice quality in Windows 7 and 8 is quite nice, as far as synthetic voices go. $v…
Tag: new-object
Ping IP Range
Last week I came across a post on using PowerShell, or more specifically a .NET Framework class, to ping a range of computers in an IP subnet. The original post by Thomas Maurer is here. I added a comment. And after looking at this again I decided to take the ball and run with it…
Convert Text to Object
Today I have another tool in my new battle regarding turning command line tools into PowerShell tools. The bottom line is we want to have objects written to the pipeline. At the PowerShell Deep Dive in Frankfurt there was a suggestion about providing tools to help with the transformation from CLI to PowerShell and this…
Process Snapshot
Yesterday I ended up running an impromptu browser test, comparing memory utilization. See what Twitter can do to your time!! The browsers themselves are really irrelevant. What you might find useful is the little PowerShell code I put together to periodically check and compare the browser processes.
Scripting Games 2011 Beginner Event 5 Commentary
My commentary for Beginner Event 5 in the 2011 Scripting Games is now available. One item that seems to be missing on the ScriptingGuys site is my complete solution so I thought I would share it here, plus a variation.
Get Common Data
While judging entries in this year’s Scripting Games I realized there were some common properties that were repeatedly used. This got me thinking about a simple way to retrieve that information with a single command Then you could access the data values from within your script. I’ve put together a relatively simply function called Get-Common…
Get File Hash
The other day I had the need to calculate MD5 file hashes in order to compare files. The PowerShell Community Extensions has a nifty cmdlet, Get-Hash, that does exactly that. Unfortunately, sometimes even free tools like this aren’t an option, as in the case of my client. Or they don’t go far enough. So with…
Friday Fun: Let’s Play Bingo!
Today Campers we’re playing Bingo. Or at least getting ready to. This week I have some PowerShell code that will create a BINGO card. For those of you outside of North America you might need to take a crash course on this game. But even if you don’t play, this article will demonstrate some useful…
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…
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…