Regular Expressions is often referred to as wizardry or magic and for that reason I stayed away from it for most of my career. I used it only when I had to and most of the time just reused examples that I found online. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but I never took the time to learn it. I thought it was reserved for the elite. Turns out that it’s not that complicated and that I had been using it for years without knowing it.
Do you spend hours a day in PowerShell? Switching back and forth between PowerShell windows getting you down? Have you ever wanted “Quake” mode for your terminal?
If we are going to spend so much time in PowerShell, we may as well make it pretty.
Check out the Ultimate PowerShell Prompt Customization and Git Setup Guide for how to:
Install and customize ConEmu Enable Quake Mode for your terminal Setup your PowerShell Profile Install and use Posh-Git Generate and use SSH Keys with GitHub Squash Git commits
At the beginning of July, we welcomed our 3rd son into the world. As days past my wife and I would say, “wow, he’s 11 days old. Can you believe it?!”. I’m sure parents out there are relating to this!
This gave me an idea for a fun script that would get your age in years, months and days, tell you how many days until your birthday and your star sign.
“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 documentation page, and that is a good place to start, but that barely covers half the topic. It assumes you need quotes and then helps you appreciate some of the factors to consider when choosing single quotes or double quotes.
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. That is, you need to do development in PowerShell just as you would with other languages, and in particular to increase robustness and decrease maintenance cost with unit tests and–dare I say–test-driven development (TDD).
Having an understanding of your systems performance is a crucial part of running IT infrastructure.
If a user comes to us and says “why is my application running slowly?”, where do we start? Is it their machine? Is it the database server? Is it the file server?
The first thing we usually do is open up perfmon.exe and take a look at some performance counters. You then see the CPU on the database server is 100% and think _ “was the CPU always at 100% or did this issue just start today?
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 your own, either hand-crafting MAML files or using targeted MAML editors far removed from your source code. But not anymore. With the advent of Chris Lambrou’s open-source XmlDoc2CmdletDoc, the world has been righted upon its axis once more: it allows instrumenting your C# source with doc-comments just like any other C# source:
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 when trying to automate across multiple machines.
There are not many A to B examples of translating VBA to PowerShell so I took a problem I had solved in the past and presented the before and after.
If you are not on Office 365 or have a tenant set up with Microsoft yet, now is the time to reserve your tenant name! With utilizing Office 365, a lot of administration is only available from a PowerShell session. There is a mix of outdated information on what you actually need to install and execute in order to connect to all of the Office 365 services. As a result, I accumulated and wrote up the current download requirements and commands to connect and administer every Office 365 service from one PowerShell session.
ChatOps is a term used to describe bringing development or operations work that is already happening in the background into a common chat room. It involves having everyone in the team in a single chat room, then bringing tools into the room so everyone can automate, collaborate and see how automation is used to solve problems. In doing so, you are unifying the communication about what work gets done and have a history of it happening.