I just finished a week of PowerShell training in Phoenix. It was a terrific class that uses the Learn PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches book as the course material. I will be back in Phoenix next month to teach the class and I’m also on the books for the course in March. If…
Tag: PowerShell
Friday Fun: Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is?
In PowerShell it is brain-dead easy to get the date and time with Get-Date. If you look through articles I’ve posted you’ll find plenty of examples using Get-Date and the [DateTime] object. But now that we’re getting ready for a new year, I thought you might be planning ahead and might want a few shortcuts…
Friday Fun: A Christmas Present for You
Over the years a number of people in the PowerShell community have shared Christmas and holiday related items. I’ve collected them and in some cases tweaked a little bit. This year I decided to wrap them all up in a module for you. This will work in PowerShell 2.0 and later. #requires -version 2.0 <#…
Friday the 13th PowerShell Fun
Well here are once again and another Friday the 13th. I love these days because I feel challenged to come up with 13 PowerShell related tidbits which I hope you’ll find fun and maybe even a little educational. Today’s collection should work primarily on PowerShell 3.0. Most items might also work on PowerShell 2.0. A…
Updated Console Graphing in PowerShell
The other day Distinguished Engineer and PowerShell Godfather Jeffrey Snover posted a blog article about the evils of Write-Host. His take, which many agree with, is that Write-Host is a special case cmdlet. In his article he mentions console graphing as an example. I wrote such a script earlier this year. Mr. Snover’s post drove…
Friday Fun: Theme Me Up!
When PowerShell 3.0 came out, one of the compelling features was a re-vamped PowerShell ISE. Options in the ISE included the ability to fine-tune and customize the appearance including items like font, token colors, and screen colors. If I recall correctly, in PowerShell 2.0, if you wanted to customize the appearance, you needed to add…
Get PowerShell Version with WMI
With the release of PowerShell 4.0, it is possible you might end up with a mix of systems in your environment. I know I do because I do a lot of writing, testing and development that requires multiple versions in my test network. Recently I was doing some Group Policy work when I thought about…
PowerShell Clean Up Tools
A few years ago I think I posted some PowerShell clean up tools. These were functions designed to help clear out old files, especially for folders like TEMP. Recently I decided to upgrade them to at least PowerShell 3.0 to take advantage of v3 cmdlets and features. I use these periodically to clean out my…
More PowerShell Trace Window Fun
On my last Friday Fun, I posted an article about using Internet Explorer as a trace window. The idea was to put debug or trace messages in a separate application. I received a comment on the post that suggested I could do a similar thing using the Debug View utility from Sysinternals. This application is…
Friday Fun: Create a PowerShell Trace Window
Way back in the day, it was all VBScript and HTAs for me. I built a number of HTA tools for other people to use. As you might expect they didn’t always work and troubleshooting something I couldn’t see was difficult. So I came up with a solution to use an Internet Explorer window as…
Download SysInternals with PowerShell
Like many IT Pros, I’m a big fan of the utilities that make up the Sysinternals suite. A number of years ago, Microsoft created a “live” web directory (http:\\live.sysinternals.com\tools) that allowed you direct access to each utility. While this is very handy, personally I prefer to keep a local version. I used to periodically check…
Friday Fun: 50 Shades of PowerShell HTML Reports
I’ve been working on a project for a client that includes creating an HTML report, generated by PowerShell. I originally thought I would include a certain feature but decided against it. However, this is so cool I thought I’d share it with you as a Friday Fun article. I’ve done alot this year with some…
Managing Local Admin with PowerShell
Years ago when I was deep into VBScript and HTAs, I wrote a tool called PWDMan. It was an HTA that processed a list of computers and returned password age information for the local administrator account. It was also capable of setting a new account password. Apparently this is still a common task because I’ll…
Out with the Windows.old
Over the last few days I’ve started the process of upgrading my test virtual machines to Windows Server 2012 R2, or in the case of my mini Hyper-V server, to the final bits of Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. In many cases I had been running the preview bits. I know I probably should have…
Runspaces, Remoting and Workflow, Oh My!
The other day on Twitter I saw a message about new script in the Microsoft Script Center on getting remote event logs with WMI. So I took a look at the script. If you take a minute to look at the script you’ll quickly realize this is not a script for beginners. My initial thought…