December, 2006

John Smith asked what TRUE and FALSE were in PowerShell on our newsgroup Microsoft.Public.Windows.PowerShell. The simple answer to this is $TRUE and $FALSE but the complete answer is a richer. PowerShell has a very rich notion of TRUE and FALSE. The best...

We pride ourselves about being a bit overboard when it comes to Error handling. That is why our sparse (non-existing?) documentation of THROW and TRAP handling is both ironic and sad. 10,000 apologizes for that, we'll fix it in the next release. In...

With Windows PowerShell you can specify -CONFIRM on commands that have a side-effect on the system and it will ask you whether to perfmon the action or not. e.g. PS> Stop-Process 7004 -Confirm Confirm Are you sure you want to perform this action...

You might have noticed that “findstr” does not work properly with non-English text in PowerShell. For example: Let’s create a text file with some Chinese characters in it. PS C:\> ${c:\test.txt}=" 中文 " Try to use findstr to find one of...

Windows PowerShell Software Development Kit (SDK) is now available as part of Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Vista. Microsoft Windows SDK can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C2B1E300-F358-4523-B479-F53D234CDCCF&displaylang...

<Changed DYI => DIY. jps> At Microsoft, "to ship is to choose". One of the things we were very disappointed in not being able to ship in V1.0 is a ternary operator . Here is a description of a ternary operator from Wikipedia: Many programming...

$hay has a new scripting blog at http://scriptolog.blogspot.com/ . His first blog entry Restart your engine - The PowerShell Way , talks about how he frequently edits his PowerShell profile file and then restarts his session. In his directions he says...

Here is a pointer to a good demonstration of PowerShell's [SWITCH] datatype: http://msgoodies.blogspot.com/2006/12/negating-powershell-switch-parameters.html Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows PowerShell/MMC Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell Team...

Recently I posted the following to the Microsoft.Public.Windows.PowerShell newsgroup (which you should participate in if you are not yet) Below is a function that I encourage you to add to your Profile files and then use when reporting an error...

We had a bad windstorm here and most people have been without power since Thursday night. Microsoft was closed on Friday and power got restored sometime during the weekend. Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows PowerShell/Aspen Architect Visit the Windows...

I love the fact that we designed PowerShell for Admins and IT Pros and love to demonstrate what that means. Often I'll demo PowerShell and show how you can use "KB", "MB", and "GB" as I did in my previous blog entry : PS> 1kb 1024 PS> 1mb 1048576...

In my previous post about Boolean Values And Operators I made the following point: " PowerShell has a rich notion of TRUE/FALSE because it dramatically reduces the overhead and junk that you need to deal with when doing your work. " This philosophy flows...

<Updated script on 1/1/2007 to reflect fixes suggested by James Manning> Dennis Verwiej is doing some great PowerShell work over at his blog Just PowerShell It at http://dverweij.spaces.live.com/ . Recently he posted a blog entry Import Citrix...

In my previous blog about the Philosophy of Automation , I encouraged everyone to share their automation even when it was small. Here I'll follow that advice. I find myself doing quite a bit of blogging and commenting on other people's blogs. I am...

As an attempt to spread some holiday joy, Satish Mathew and I wrote the following script. Hope you enjoy it! - Marcel Ortiz ######################################################################################## $notes = write-output ` 4A4 4A4...

Boy do I love the community aspect of PowerShell. The great thing about it is that you get the leverage really smart people from across the world. I never spent any time thinking about screen savers and it turns out that you can just execute them like...

Jeffery Hicks as a very nice File Aging script. The thing that Iike about it is that it provides a very good illustration of how to use a number of PowerShell features including: Working with Files Working with Dates Control structures: if...

WaiKin Wong sent me a Mandelbrot one-liner: $i=$j=$r=$x=$y=[float]-16; while(($y++) -lt 15) {for($x=0; ($x++) -lt 84; write-host (" .:-;!/>`)|&IH%*#"[$k -band 15]) -nonewline){$i=$k=$r=[float]0;do{$j=$r*$r-$i*$i-2+$x/25;$i=2*$r*$i+$y/10;$r=...

You still have an opportunity to step into the winners circle by submitting your PowerShell Scripts to our Scripting contest. Your entry has to submitted by Dec 15, 2006 to be eligible to win. We all techies so let's do the math - We are giving...

Jeffery Hicks has a very cool blog entry where he defines a Get-Weather script which downloads the weather from yahoo.com, casts the results to XML and then reports the weather using the Speech object. It's totally cool. I'm going to show it off today...

A number of people have asked me about PowerShell IDEs and about how to get started with PowerShell. Here is something to consider - Sapien is offering a special price on a package of components focused on PowerShell. The package includes Tools (PrimalScript...

In response to my entry Philosophy of Automation , Tim Long blogged a response where he advanced the idea that people should make a New Year's Resolution to start a blog (if you have already). That is a great idea. I would follow on and further encourage...

The state of blogging software is pretty sad. I must be a harder problem than I can imagine (of course there are other explainations but I'll be gracious and go with that one for now.) I started a entry, got distracted and posted another blog entry...

A while ago I posted an entry about PowerShell and IIS7 which then directed you to a video of the demo I did with Bill Staples the PUM of IIS. BTW - PUM stands for Product Unit Manager aka "BigWig", aka "Grand Pooba". A PUM has like the CEO of a...

Get-PSUGUK is the name of the PowerShell UserGroup being formed in the UK. They are having their first meeting on January 24th 2007 at Global Knowledge's office in Workingham starting at 18:00. PowerGadgets is providing the beer and pizza. The draft agenda...