Articles

PowerShell articles, tutorials, and guides from community experts.

Dec 19, 2013 • Don Jones

Scripting Games

Coaches and Judges Selected for Winter Scripting Games

We’ve had an outpouring of support for the upcoming games, with more volunteers than we know what to do with! At this point, we have our judging panel completely full; we’re operating with a fairly small group of celebrity judges this time around. Games Master Richard Siddaway will introduce our judges in a few days. We’ve also filled our roster of Coaches, and Head Coach Mike Robbins will provide that lineup soon also.

Dec 10, 2013 • Don Jones

PowerShell for Admins

How "Quick and Dirty" Becomes "Permanent and Annoying."

Consider the following: $computers = Get-ADComputer -filter * -searchBase "ou=test,dc=company,dc=pri" foreach ($computer in $computers) { write-host "computer $computer" $result = Do-Something -computername $computer Write-Host "$($result.property) and $($result.value)" } Would you ever consider that acceptable? Some folks might well say, “sure! if I was just testing this, throwing in those Write-Hosts is no big deal. Heck, even if I was the only one who was going to use this, Write-Host isn’t bad.

Dec 10, 2013 • Terri Donahue

Charlotte Powershell User Group Holiday-themed Scripting Games

The Charlotte Powershell Users Group meeting was held on Dec 5th. Jim put together a nifty challenge related to image manipulation. We started off with this nifty image. Pretty huh? The challenge was to manipulate the image using PowerShell to find the hidden message. After some discussion, the code was cracked and the image was displayed. As is normal with Powershell, there were multiple ways to achieve the end goal. Feel free to stop reading here and grab the image if you want to give this a go yourself.

Dec 10, 2013 • John Mello

PhillyPoSH 12/05/2013 meeting summary and presentation materials

Sunny Chakraborty gave an in-depth presentation on WMI Eventing using PowerShell. A copy of his presentation and scripts can be found here, and a recording of his presentation can be found on our YouTube channel. If you want to learn even more about WMI, Sunny recommends checking out Alain Lissoir’s webpage and downloading he WSH and VBS scripts hosted on his site for the two books he was written: “How to exploit the power of Microsoft’s WMI to create mission-critical computing infrastructures” and “Leveraging Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Scripting”

Dec 2, 2013 • Don Jones

Announcements

Scheduled site downtime

Windows Azure has advised us of scheduled downtime on Friday, December 6, from approximately 15:00 hours (US Pacific) until approximately midnight Pacific time.

Nov 14, 2013 • Don Jones

Books

Community Book of PowerShell Practices

Released in our new Git repo:Â _The Community Book of PowerShell Practices,Â _an ongoing book started from this past Summer’s “Great Debates” blog post series. Grab it fromÂ https://github.com/PowerShellOrg/ebooks/blob/master/Practices/2013Sep_Practices/2013Sep_Practices.doc and enjoy!

Nov 14, 2013 • Don Jones

Training

Last chance for feedback on PowerShell course 10961A/B

I’m in the midst of working on 10961C, the Windows Server 2012 R2 / Windows 8.1 / PowerShell 4.0 update of Microsoft’s 10961A/B course, “Automating Administration with Windows PowerShell.” I anticipate this being closed out by the end of November, 2013, so if you’ve taken or taught this course and have any feedback - even a typo - now’s the time to tell me. Drop a comment below, or e-mail me (if you have my address). Please, no Twitter replies on this one.
The course will not be substantially changed from the B rev; because PowerShell v4 doesn’tÂ change much, especially at the entry-level covered by 10961, there wasn’t much to alter. But I’m trying to sweep up as many lingering bugs and typos as possible. Kudos to MCT Jason Yoder for firing over a list of fixes!

Nov 13, 2013 • John Mello

PhillyPoSH 11/07/2013 meeting summary and presentation materials

John Mello gave a presentation on a script that searches a mailbox for an email by subject and downloads any attachments it may contain. A copy of his scripts can be obtained here. Jason Helmick, Senior Technologist at Concentrated Tech andÂ Windows PowerShell MVP, gave a presentation on “Understanding the Pipeline ““ Getting your one-liners to work!” A copy of his script can be found here. A recording of Jason Helmick"™s presentation can be found on our YouTube channel.

Nov 11, 2013 • Don Jones

Announcements

Login now required for comments

A quick note and an apology: I’ve had to modify the site configuration to require users to be registered and logged in before they can comment. We’ve been taking aÂ ridiculous amount of comment spam, and it’s consuming more and more time to weed through it. You can register using any major social media account, so you don’t have to remember yet another username and password with us, so hopefully that’ll mitigate the inconvenience.

Nov 7, 2013 • Enrique Puig