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Mike F Robbins

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Mike F Robbins

19 articles published

• 1 min read

Walkthrough: An example of how I write PowerShell functions

A couple of days ago I posted a blog article titled “PowerShell function: Test-ConsoleColor provides a visual demonstration of the foreach scripting construct” and today I thought I would walk you through that function step by step since it’s what I consider to be a well written PowerShell function. It starts out by using the #Requires statement to require at least PowerShell version 3 or it won’t run. It also requires that the PowerShell Community Extensions module be installed since it uses a function from that module and continuing without it only leads to errors:

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PowerShell for Admins
• 2 min read

Mississippi PowerShell User Group Virtual Meeting – June 9th 2015

Join us virtually on Tuesday, June 9th at 8:30pm Central Time when PowerShell MVP Trevor Sullivan will present “Creating Object-Oriented Scripts using PowerShell Classes” . During this deep, technical discussion, we will take a look at PowerShell classes, and then authoring PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) Resource using PowerShell v5 classes. We’ll also explore leveraging PowerShell DSC on Microsoft Azure infrastructure (IaaS) virtual machines using the Azure VM DSC Extension. This session assumes some previous knowledge of PowerShell & DSC, so make sure you’re familiar with the basics ahead of time!

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• 2 min read

Mississippi PowerShell User Group Virtual Meeting – May 12th 2015

Join us virtually on Tuesday, May 12th at 8:30pm Central Time when PowerShell MVP Kirk Munro will present “A peek inside the Poshoholic’s toolbelt”. It’s easy to get excited about all of the new technologies that are being talked about these days. PowerShell 5. Windows 10. Nano server. .NET Core. But none of these technologies have been released yet, and even when they are released, it will be some time before we can fully adopt them in our organizations.

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• 1 min read

PowerShell Tip from the Head Coach of the 2014 Winter Scripting Games: Design for Performance and Efficiency!

There are several concepts that come to mind when discussing the topic of designing your PowerShell commands for performance and efficiency, but in my opinion one of the items at the top of the list is “Filtering Left” which is what I’ll be covering in this blog article. First, let’s start out by taking a look at an example of a simple one-liner command that’s poorly written from a performance and efficiency standpoint:

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Scripting Games
• 1 min read

PowerShell Tip #3 from the Winner of the Advanced Category in the 2013 Scripting Games

In my previous blog article (PowerShell Tip #2), I left off with the subject of inline help and stated there was a better way. I’m fast-forwarding through lots of concepts and jumping right into “Advanced Functions and Scripts” with this tip because they are where you’ll find the answer to a “better way” to add inline help. Click here to be redirected to the original post of this article on the author’s blog site where you can read the remainder of the article.

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Scripting Games
• 1 min read

PowerShell Tip #2 from the Winner of the Advanced Category in the 2013 Scripting Games

Tip #2 - Comment (Document) your code! This is another one of those tips that probably isn’t very popular, but regardless of how good you are at writing PowerShell scripts and functions, they’re useless if no one else can figure out how to use them. You might be thinking that you’re the only one who uses the PowerShell code that you write, but I’m sure that you like to go on vacation just like the rest of us and none of us are going to live forever.

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Scripting Games
• 1 min read

PowerShell Tip #1 from the Winner of the Advanced Category in the 2013 Scripting Games

In case you haven’t heard, the 2014 Winter Scripting Games are just now getting started. Regardless of your skill level with PowerShell, it couldn’t be a better time to participate since this is the first time in the history of the scripting games that you’ll be able to work as part of a team and receive proactive feedback (before your code is judged) from a team of expert coaches who use PowerShell in the real world on a daily basis.

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Scripting Games
• 2 min read

Introducing the Coaches of the 2014 Winter Scripting Games

A few weeks ago, just before the announcement to start recruiting your team for the 2014 Winter Scripting Games, I was contacted by Don Jones and Richard Siddaway about an opportunity to become the Head Coach for the Winter Scripting Games. I was honored to have been contacted and I’m a firm believer of taking advantage of opportunities when they emerge, especially when they’re PowerShell related, so I graciously accepted.

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Scripting Games
• 2 min read

People Who are Blogging About the 2013 Scripting Games

I’m sure that most people can easily find any of the blogs of the official judges from the 2013 Scripting Games. I recommend reading those blogs whether you’re competing in the scripting games or not since there’s a wealth of great information contained in them. The best place to find those blogs if you don’t know already is the Judges Notes section under the Scripting Games area on PowerShell.org so there’s no reason to duplicate them here.

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Scripting Games