FolderShare + Powershell = Global Powershell Profile

aaronmar — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:43:08 GMT

I am starting to force myself to learn new tricks and generally use Powershell more and more. The other day, I though to myself...wouldn't it be great if I could have a global profile and set of scripts on all the various machines that I use on a day-to-day basis?

For example, I added the UAC elevate function that Peter Provost wrote to my PS profile. How do I get this on all my machines without having to manually edit my profile file on each machine?

This became pretty easy with FolderShare. I'm using FolderShare as basically a personal peer-to-peer service for my machines. I just set up all my machines to share the Documents\WindowsPowershell folder...and voila! Now all my machines use the same Powershell profile when I fire up powershell.exe! When I make a tweak on one machine, the changed profile gets updated on all other other machines where I've set up FolderShare. This also means that any scripts I add to that folder get automatically synced.

Scripting Visual Studio with Windows PowerShell

aaronmar — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:34:20 GMT

One of the really cool new things that shipped recently that I've been trying to learn more about is Windows Powershell. What's really great about it is that if your object supports COM or .NET, you can automate it just by firing up the command line.

To get an instance of Visual Studio running, I can do the following :

$dte = New-Object -comobject "VisualStudio.DTE"

(Note that if you have multiple versions installed you can specify VisualStudio.DTE.7.0 for VS 2002, VisualStudio.DTE.7.1 for VS 2003 or VisualStudio.DTE.8.0 for VS 2005.)

Since the DTE object was created via code and not by a user action, VS runs in silent mode (no user interface shown). I can show the main form with:

$dte.MainWindow.Visible = $true

For a useless example, if I want to close all the windows in the shell, I can do the following:

foreach ($w in $dte.Windows) { $w.Close() }

The cool thing about this really isn't that I can script Visual Studio (I could already do that from IronPython, VBScript or any other environment that can talk to COM objects), but that I can do it from the same command line that I use for other tasks in Windows.

Aaron Marten : PowerShell

FolderShare + Powershell = Global Powershell Profile

Scripting Visual Studio with Windows PowerShell