Quick and dirty how-to for configuring symbols for Process Explorer and WinDbg. A knowledge capture from David Solomon's Windows OS Internals Lab, because I know I'll need this later....

PSH> [System.Runtime.InteropServices.marshal]::PtrToStringAuto([System.Runtime.InteropServices.marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($securestring)) ...

To review, we learned a few things: 1) PowerShell interacts with COM pretty cleanly. 2) WScript.Shell creates shortcuts. 3) My $profile has stuff I don't ever use. ...

Enter console.exe, found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/. To be accurate, the project is actually named 'Console 2.0', explicitly called out here for search engine indexing. It provides a modern terminal interface, and allows other shells to be hosted, such as cmd.exe (default), PowerShell, and CygWin *sh....

PSH> (Get-Date).GetDateTimeFormats() | & { begin { $i = 0; } process { "{0}`t$_" -f $i++ } }...

Instead of saying 'oops' and sending out a recall request after re-reading the email and realizing I completely mis-read the intent (or other reasons behind office seppuku), I've told Outlook to queue my mail for a few minutes before sending....

To review, we learned a few things: 1) Get-Member allows us to inspect an object's class members. 2) We can specify MemberType to filter Get-Member's output. 3) Foreach-Object loops over each item in a list, such as an object's properties....

PSH> (Get-Command kernel32.dll).FileVersionInfo.IsDebug...

PSH> gc file | group | ft count, name | select -f 10 ...

In review, we learned a few things: 1) The PowerGUI Script Editor does syntax colouring, code block folding, and many more IDE features. And it's free. 2) A PowerShell script can have an enormous amount of UI functionality. It's command-line, but it's still a UI. 3) We really have no excuse to write scripts that are lacking help text, poorly factored, or lack code documentation....

To review, we learned three things: PowerShell comes with a bunch of aliases for common commands. 1) We can dump the list to see what it provides, and sort it by either alias or definition. 2) We can create more, so long as we don't overwrite existing ones. (More on that later.)...

To review, we learned two things: 1) We can use Get-Member to inspect any object for its member set (methods and properties.) 2) We can override the default output formatter to overcome PowerShell's insistence on truncating lines....

To review, we learned a few things: 1) How to inspect a non-printing character that is fouling things up. 2) How to use cmdkey.exe to update cached credentials for Remote Desktop. 3) [byte][char] is a long way to say ord(). 4) When the PowerShell team said, "Saving the world, one one-liner at a time," they didn't limit themselves to 80 characters....

To review, we learned a few things: 1) We can automate our login with ssh-agent and PuTTY's pagent. 2) We scratched the surface of public/private key infrastructure. 3) Now we can automate tasks across Unix hosts without the security hole that is rsh....

To review, we learned two things: 1) "To execute an object, call its ToString() method, then print the value returned." This is useful because we know every object has a ToString() method, so we can safely print any chunk of data, er, object. 2) PowerShell, like an onion, has layers. ...

To review, we learned a few things: 1) There are a lot of PowerShell books out there. 2) Some won't apply to us at the beginner's level....