Sometimes, as a developer, you want to be be able to keep track of free space on a drive, the size of a log, the load on your CPU, the number of users logged in, etc. With PowerShell, it is typically just a matter of finding the right cmdlet amidst the large (and rapidly growing) pool of cmdlets …
For those of you that have been at PowerShell Summits over the last few years you’ll have heard Jeffrey Snover state that he wanted to take PowerShell to other platforms. Now its happened Jeffrey has announced that an ALPHA release of PowerShell is now available for Linux and Mac. Currently …
“To be or not to be”. Without getting into a debate over whether Shakespeare was musing about being a logician, suffice to say that in writing prose, the rules of when and how to use quotation marks are relatively clear. In PowerShell, not so much. Sure, there is an about_Quoting_Rules …
So you’ve decided to write a bunch of commands to help automate the administration of ____. Awesome! Let’s try and make sure you get off on the right path, with this high-level overview of command design. Start with an inventory You’ll need to start by deciding _what commands to …
Quick as you can, can you explain what each of these different parentheses-, brace-, and bracket-laden expressions does? ${save-items} ${C:tmp.txt} $($x=1;$y=2;$x;$y) (1,2,3 -join '*') (8 + 4)/2 $hashTable.ContainsKey($x) @(1) @{abc='hello'} {param($color="red"); "color=$color"} …
PowerShell 5 brought class based DSC Resources, which majorly simplifies the process of writing custom DSC resources. During my time working on some custom resources, I developed some tips a long the way which should save you some time and pain during your DSC journey. The tips cover: Structuring …
By the time you are using PowerShell to automate an increasing amount of your system administration, database maintenance, or application-lifecycle work, you will likely come to the realization that PowerShell is indeed a first-class programming language and, as such, you need to treat it as such. …
Long has it been known how to easily document your PowerShell source code simply by embedding properly formatted documentation comments right along side your code, making maintenance relatively painless… But if you advanced to writing your PowerShell cmdlets in C#, you have largely been on …
After authoring last month scripting games puzzle, which involved some scripting around the Unicode standard, I decided to have some fun and write a PowerShell module which interacts directly with the online Unicode Database (UCD) to retrieve the main properties of characters. Using this module you …
There is a lot of documentation out there for interacting with Microsoft Office including Outlook, Excel, Word, etc with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). A lot of time you may only be able to find VBA examples. VBA’s require template files to be sent to the desktop and are a real hassle …
