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…
Tag: Scripting
Friday Fun: Get PowerShell User Groups
The other day Don Jones tweeted about find a PowerShell user group. In case you didn’t know, just about every user group associated with PowerShell can be found online at http://powershellgroup.org. This is a terrific resource for finding a user group near you. Of course, Twitter being what it is someone joked about the lack…
PSBlogWeek Ebook and PDF Available
We really appreciate the interest in our PowerShell Blog Week experiment. It was a lot of fun and it seems many of you got something useful out of it as well. I wouldn’t be too surprised if you don’t see another event later this year, most likely with even more contributors. In the mean time,…
Friday Fun: What’s My IP
Today’s Friday Fun is a “quick and dirty” solution to the question, “What is my public IP address?” There are plenty of web sites and services you can visit that will display that piece of information. Naturally I want an easy way to get this in PowerShell. Recently I came across a reference to a…
PowerShell Blogging Week: Supporting WhatIf and Confirm
We hope you are enjoying this experiment in community blogging. In today’s contribution I want to demonstrate how you can add support for WhatIf and Confirm to your advanced PowerShell functions. It is actually quite easy, especially if your function is simply calling other PowerShell commands that already support –Whatif and –Confirm. The recommended best…
What PowerShell Script Was I Working On?
Last week I shared a script for finding recently modified files in a given directory. In fact, it wouldn’t be that difficult to find the last files I was working on and open them in the PowerShell ISE. Assuming my Get-RecentFile function is loaded it is a simple as this: get-recentfile -Days 4 -Newest 2…
Friday Fun: Get Recent Files
As you might imagine, I work on a lot of different files throughout the week. Sometimes it is hard to keep everything straight. I’ll want to return to script I was working on yesterday, but I can’t remember what I called it. So I spend a few minutes searching and filtering until I find it….
Send from PowerShell ISE to Microsoft Word Revisited
Many of you seemed to like my little PowerShell ISE add-on to send text from the script pane to a Word document. I should have known someone would ask about a way to make it colorized. You can manually select lines in a script and when you paste them into Word they automatically inherit the…
Pi in the Sky
In celebration of Pi day, I thought I’d post some quick and dirty PowerShell code you can use to calculate pi. I found some easy to follow explanations at http://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Pi that weren’t too difficult to transform into PowerShell code. And you might even learn something new about PowerShell along the way. Before we begin, I…
Friday Fun: Send PowerShell ISE Content to Word
Yesterday on Facebook, Ed Wilson was lamenting about confusion of keyboard shortcuts between PowerShell and Microsoft Word. I’ve run into the same issue. Muscle memory is strong. Then the discussion turned to getting content from the PowerShell ISE into a Word document. I humorously suggested we had a plugin and it had a Ctrl+C keyboard…
Friday Fun: Size Me Up
Part of day job involves creating training material, often in the form of video training for Pluralsight or articles for Petri.com. Since I usually am covering PowerShell I often need to capture a PowerShell session. And sometimes I want the screen to be a particular size. So over time I’ve created a few PowerShell tools…
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.