In the windows scripting host environment, the WScript.Quit method can be used to return an exit code to a calling process. In 99.9% of the cases, the value set with the WSCript.Quit method will be returned as expected. If you are running your script...

In my last blog, I provided a sample PowerShell script that shows how to use the System.DirectoryServices namespace from .NET Framework to bulk create users. Now I will show you can you can use the same namespace to search the Active Directory. We...

There are several ways to programmatically create users in the Active Directory. The easiest way would be to use the Active Directory PowerShell Module. This is great if you have access to a Windows 2008 R2 domain controller as the Active Directory PowerShell...

I was recently working with a developer who wanted to know if there is a way to get the error when they call the Invoke-Expression cmdlet. He was using the $LastExitCode to determine if it succeeded or not. Unfortunately, the $LastExitCode was not returning...

I have a customer that was trying to automate the RemoteApp and Desktop Connection but couldn't find any information that shows you the steps on how to do this. First, there is a feature on Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 called  RemoteApp and Desktop...

When Windows 7 was the first version of Windows that released which included the Windows PowerShell 2.0. For most users, using the PowerShell console is more than enough to perform some of the most common operations. What a lot of people don't know is...

T he COMException error 0x5011 (S_ADS_ERRORSOCCURRED) can be thrown when you are enumerating the PrincipalSearchResult collection returned by UserPrincipal::GetGroups method if the UserPrincipal object is initialized with a PrincipalContext of a user...

When we create a SQL Linked Server to AD, there are certain limitations. For example, we cannot retrieve multivalued attributes from AD. More information on limitations with SQL Linked Server queries can be found in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299410...

You might see your custom storage class resource appears with a ‘?’ icon on Windows 2008 R2 Fail Over Cluster as shown in the following picture: The disk icon with ‘?’ mark may mislead the developers and end users of...

Recently, I was working with a customer who was trying to get the user’s group membership using the TokenGroup attribute. In the VB.Net code, he was using this filter to get the group object back: Dim sid As String = "S-1-5-21-2146773085-903363285...

A proxy object is an object in ADAM that represents a security principal in Active Directory. Each proxy object in ADAM contains the SID of a user in Active Directory. Proxy objects (and proxy object classes) do not exist by default in ADAM. However,...

The WMI class Win32_product can be used to obtain a list of all the products installed on a remote machine. Below is a PowerShell example of how to use the Win32_Product class to retrieve product information from a remote machine: Get-WmiObject -Class...

To map a volume with drive letter to disk partition, one may use some combination of WMI classes like Win32_LogicalDisk,Win32_LogicalDiskToPartition,Win32_DiskPartition, Win32_DiskDriveToDiskPartition and Win32_DiskDrive. Unfortunately WMI...

PowerShell is a great scripting language. You can get complex results by just a one liner, which would have taken a couple of lines in the other scripting languages to generate the same output, but don’t be surprised if you find a simple subtraction 1...

Recently, I was working on a scenario where I was trying to update the attributes of ADAM objects. If I clear an attribute value which is null and then I call CommitChanges on the object, it gives me an exception : 0x8007200a (The specified directory...

Bruce Payette, one of the original designers of PowerShell, visited us in Charlotte this week. One slide in his PowerPoint deck showed a stack of PowerShell books as long as my arm. Yet, the only book I’ve seen so far that covers the features of PowerShell...

The articles you have seen so far on this blog have been largely demonstrations. When one of our customers asks us how they can do something, such as programmatically creating group policies, we write them some sample code that shows them how to do whatever...

Ordinarily, if you create a 64 bit WMI provider to run on a server, you will create a corresponding 32 bit provider as well. In some instances, only a 64 bit WMI provider exists. This creates an interesting dilemma. Consider the scenario where a 32 bit...

WMI provides two very useful Resultant Set of Policy (RSOP) classes that can be used together to determine the current set of GPOs that are applied to the local machine. The RSOP_GPO class provides information about GPOs that could be applied to...

An "Access Denied" exception is generated migrating users from Windows 2000 or 2003 domain to a Windows 2008 domain using DsAddSidHistory API ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms675918(VS.85).asp x ) and pass "SrcDomainController" & "SrcDomainCreds...

This happens because If there is no container specified, the principal context class will create a System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry object by binding to builtin CN=Users container to start searching for users. System.DirectoryServices is built...

As anyone who has managed the Active Directory knows, if you delete an Active Directory object, although it marked as tombstoned, all the linked and non-linked attribute values are cleared. It is therefore difficult to reanimate the object because extra...

In my previous post we discussed how to modify a registry based GPO programmatically. In this post we will focus on using the GPMC ( Group Policy Management Console ) object model to find a GPO that contains a specific string in the display name. The...

In my last bog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/dsadsi/archive/2009/07/23/working-with-group-policy-objects-programmatically-determining-registry-values-to-enable-disable-set-a-specific-policy.aspx I discussed an empirical method to determine the values...

Greetings! Over the past few months our team has seen a number of customer requesting information on how to programmatically/create/edit/read registry based GPO information. I took some time to combine a couple of samples into one that illustrates...