Shay Levy is a Co-founder and editor of the PowerShell Magazine. He is a multiple-year recipient of the Microsoft MVP award, and a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). Shay often covers PowerShell related topics on his blog and you can also follow him on Twitter at @ShayLevy
Shay LevyMicrosoft launched a new service to simplify public, private, and hybrid clouds management. Using the Microsoft Azure Automation preview you can automate the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of resources in your Microsoft Azure environment using runbooks, which under the hood are Windows PowerShell workflows.
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Shay LevyMicrosoft has released a new ISE add-on, developed by Microsoft Customer Services & Support (CSS) team, that enables you to easily search and download scripts from the TechNet Script Center, from within the scripting environment.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Yesterday, I got a call from one of our BI managers. Listen, he says, I suspect that one of my BI servers is working too hard.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. When authoring XML documents, some of the data you will use in your tags are considered invalid.
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Shay LevyWhen you double click the “This PC” desktop icon in Windows 8 you get the familiar “My Computer” window which includes several groups such as Devices and drives,_ Folders_, Network locations (in case you have mapped drives), etc.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. IIS lets you view all worker processes of a server when you double click the Worker Process tile in IIS manager (inetmgr.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. A few days ago I had to write a script to upload files to a remote FTP server.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. When you get a list of domain controllers using the AD module, one of the properties each DC has is the IsReadOnly property.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. The bandwidth utilized by a VM (QoS = Quality of Service ) can be controlled via special parameters of the virtual network card for a given VM.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. I bet this sounds familiar to you. You start working in the PowerShell console or in the ISE, and then at one point you figure out that a command you’re executing fails because your session is not elevated!
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. When working with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 and higher, you can set various Hyper-V host settings via the Hyper-V Settings dialog.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. There are several ways to test if a computer object is a virtual machine.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. Virtual Machine Connection Authorization allows users to connect to virtual machines using the VMConnect interface in Hyper-V (and Hyper-V RSAT tools).
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Occasionally you need to make changes to the hosts file, either locally or remotely on another machine.
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Shay LevyI’ve read recently a post by Hyper-V MVP Aidan Finn about a script he wrote to convert Hyper-V virtual machine VHDs to the new VHDX disk format.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. Using the Add-VMNetworkAdapterAcl cmdlet we can create ACLs (firewall-like rule) that applies to the traffic through a virtual machine network adapter.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. Similarly to the Hyper-V security feature discussed here, Hyper-V can also protect the environment from VMs pretending to act as Routers.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. In a DHCP environment, it is possible for a rogue DHCP server to respond to client DHCP requests and provide incorrect address and configuration information.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Using the Get-Counter cmdlet and the Web Service Current Connections performance counter, you can get the amount of current connections to an IIS server or to one of its web sites.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Web Deploy v3 introduced an automatic server-side backup feature for IIS 7 and above.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. In a physical switch environment, all traffic from selected ports can be duplicated and copied to a mirror port for capture and analysis, such as network diagnostic of a VM boot process or any network-related issues.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. In the previous article Matt used lambda functions to simplify data manipulation .
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. In this neat tip Jakub showed a way to control the output of the ToString method by exposing a ToString function.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. If you get a list of CIM class properties you’ll notice the CimType property.
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Shay LevyBuilt-in groups are predefined security groups, defined with domain local scope, that are created automatically when you create an Active Directory domain.
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Shay LevyHP has released a PowerShell module HPiLOCmdlets, designed to help IT experts to configure and manage HP iLO 3 and iLO 4 using Windows PowerShell.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires SharePoint 2010 or above. Whenever there’s a problem in SharePoint 2010 you are most likely using the ULS Viewer application to collect trace logs for further details about the problem in question or to monitor machines and the events they create in real-time.
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Shay LevyFor the past 5 years, PowerShell MVP Tobias Weltner has published a daily tip on powershell.com. Together with fellow MVP Aleksandar Nikolic, he’s started revising and compiling this huge tips collection for you and came up with ready-to-use pocket guides of PowerShell knowledge.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Windows provides access to many folders of the current user via the SpecialFolders collection.
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Shay LevyWindows Management Framework 4.0 is available for installation on Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Embedded 7.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires Windows 8.1 or above. The Power user menu (Win+X keyboard shortcut) introduced in Windows 8 provides quick access to various admin tools.
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Shay LevyYou have been tasked to generate a report of mailbox sizes and you quickly write the following: Get-MailboxDatabase | Get-MailboxStatistics | Select-Object DisplayName,TotalItemSize | Export-Csv .
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Getting the members of a dynamic distribution group in the Exchange Management Console (EMC) is not an issue; you open the group and click the Preview button.
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Shay LevyMobile PC Monitor is an innovative solution for monitoring and managing mission-critical IT systems using a secure mobile application that gives IT administrators complete control of their critical servers and applications from anywhere, anytime.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. One of the group types that Exchange can create is a dynamic distribution group.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 4.0 or above. The #Requires statement allows us to prevent a script from running without the required elements.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. In a previous tip we saw how to configure storage quotas for a mailbox using PowerShell.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Exchange lets us configure mailbox storage quotas for a mailbox, control the size of mailboxes and manage the growth of mailbox databases.
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Shay LevyHave you ever been asked this question and scratched your head for an answer? If so (and if not), Mark Minasi, is doing a free 40 to 60 minute webinar on the subject.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 4.0 or above. In this great post, Tobias walked you through the process of hiding functions from the debugger.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. PowerShell’s tab completion just got better in v3. In addition to all its awesomeness, it is now capable of completing service or process names, event log names, module names and the list is long.
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Shay LevyMicrosoft has released a PowerShell module for Lync Online. You can now use the module to enable and disable push notifications for both iPhones and Windows Phones, manage Exchange Unified Messaging and hosted voicemail policies, manage meeting room endpoint devices with a Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 resource mailbox, grant client inband policies using pre-created policy instances, and you can also utilize Exchange Online cmdlets to extend the capabilities of Lync Online reports beyond the currently available reports in the Office 365 admin center.
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Shay LevyHere’s another cool project created by PowerShell MVP Doug Finke. PSharp is a tool designed for PowerShell’s Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) editor.
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Shay LevyThere are many ways to get the path of the system directory (e.g system32). Here’ one that I find very useful that involves the .
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 4.0 or above. Starting in Windows PowerShell 4.0 with the new Desired State Configuration (DSC) feature, we now have one more command type added to the list of command types: Configuration.
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Shay LevyHere’s another cool variables tip. Say you want to initialize a few variables to a specific value. Instead of doing:
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Shay LevyIn the previous tip I showed how we can use multiple assignments to swap the value of two or more variable values.
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Shay LevyIn most programming languages the conventional way to swap the value of two variable is to use a third variable.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 4.0 or above. When writing functions and declaring parameters, PowerShell lets us use many parameter attributes to define the behaviour of the parameter.
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Shay LevyLet us say that you have a list of words or a sentence that you’d like to manipulate and make sure that every word starts with a capital letter.
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Shay LevyThe PowerShell Deep Dives book is ready for your reading pleasure! The book, written by Microsoft MVPs and PowerShell community experts, contains 28 chapters grouped in four parts: Administration, Scripting, Development, and Platforms.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Using the System.Environment+SpecialFolder enumeration we can retrieve a list of all paths to system special folders.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Since Windows Vista, the operating system is shipped with a ton of additional event logs and providers, some of them are present on the system but are not enabled.
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Shay LevySay you have a number like: 133903155, how quickly can you digest it? It’s much easier to read when it’s formatted as 133,903,155.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Each time you execute a command in Windows PowerShell, the command is remembered and can be fetched by using the Get-History cmdlet or by using the the up/down arrow keys.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. One of the annoyances I’m facing when working with Event logs is navigating and finding a log that is buried a few levels down the logs tree.
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Shay LevyYou want to be able to check and allow only date and time strings that are in a specific date time format pattern.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. One of the new features introduced in PowerShell 4.0 is the collection filtering by using a method syntax.
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Shay LevyHow do you turn ‘20130701’ to ‘2013-07-01’? There are many ways to tackle this, breaking it into pieces (substring) and joining it back with a dash, use some regex fu to manipulate it, parse it as a DateTime and format it and so on.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 4.0 or above. PowerShell enables you to refer to a property of an object in a dynamic fashion:
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. The Disable-ADAccount cmdlet disables an Active Directory user, computer, or service account. When you need to disable multiple accounts you might find yourself trying something obvious like:
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Shay LevyInterested in a free PowerShell course tailored especially for IT Professionals? Want to know more about PowerShell and how to use it?
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Shay Levy“Windows PowerShell 4.0 includes several significant features that extend its use, improve its usability, and allow you to control and manage Windows-based environments more easily and comprehensively.
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Shay LevySharePoint 2010 administrators are probably familiar with the following screenshot–you open the Central Administration page and you’re presented with a red Health Analyzer alert.
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Shay LevyThe task was to convert a number to the size units without using the built-in multipliers. Thank you all for taking the time to participate in this teaser.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. When you need to manage Active Directory, the Active Directory PowerShell module is the first admin choice as it provides many cmdlets for administering and interfacing with various AD objects.
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Shay LevySo, in your scripts you want to gather information from the user who runs it and you use the Read-Host cmdlet.
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Shay LevyEarlier this year, Microsoft released the Windows PowerShell 3.0 SDK Sample Pack which includes a lot of code samples that show how to build applications based on Windows PowerShell 3.
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Shay LevyHaven’t had the chance to attend the PowerShell Summit? You can now watch the recordings on YouTube thanks to Aaron Hoover, one of the great PowerShell enthusiasts who attended this successful PowerShell event.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. When you get user objects from Active Directory using the [Active Directory module cmdlets][1], you get a ‘thin’ output object that includes just a few properties.
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Shay LevyActive Directory has a special kind of attributes called Constructed attributes. Constructed attributes are not “real” attributes, they are not stored in the directory.
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Shay LevyThere are a few ways to get the site a computer is a member of. In .NET we can use the ActiveDirectorySite class.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Windows PowerShell allows you to create short names for commands using Aliases. It even allows you to specify short parameter names.
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Shay LevyYesterday I got an email asking for help to create a report of all user mailboxes in Exchange per department. When you execute a Get-Mailbox command, you’ll see that the Department property is not included in the result.
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Shay LevyMark your calendars. Registrations for the 2013 Scripting Games begin on April 22. To get a better understanding of how the games work this year (hosted on PowerShell.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Active Directory defines five FSMO roles: Schema master Domain naming master RID master PDC master Infrastructure master The first two: schema master and the domain naming master are per-forest roles.
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Shay LevySo, in your script, you need to wait for a service until it reaches a specified status and performs an action based on the new state.
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Shay LevyDue to low adoption and usage of the pre-release versions of Script Explorer, Microsoft has decided to take the project down, starting by removing the RC package from the Download Center.
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Shay LevyWhen you assign the result of a service query to a variable, you must take into account one very important thing – the result is just a snapshot of the service state for a specific point in time.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. Using WMI we can get a list of Wi-Fi adapters with the following command:
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires admin privileges (elevated shell) To get Resultant Set of Policy (RSOP) data we usually RSOP.mmc or the gpresult command line tool.
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Shay LevyDaniel Donda, Windows Expert-IT Pro MVP, has released a new PowerShell eBook written in Brazilian Portuguese. Windows PowerShell 3.0 for IT Pro is an eBook written with infrastructure administrators in mind.
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Shay LevyWhen you export PowerShell objects to HTML, using the ConvertTo-Html cmdlet, and HTML links are present as the values of the object, ConvertTo-Html doesn’t render them as HTML links.
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Shay LevyWhen automating Microsoft Excel, almost every time you’ll need to include some constant values to define the behaviour of the code.
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Shay LevyMicrosoft has released the Windows PowerShell 3.0 SDK Sample Pack. The pack contains code samples that show how to build applications based on Windows PowerShell 3.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. In a previous tip I wrote about the International module. One of the commands of the module, Get-WinHomeLocation, returns a GeoID object which represents the home location (Country and Region) of the current user account.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. Prior to PowerShell 3.0, to return a list of names or values of an Enumeration object, we needed to use the static methods of the System.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 ships with a new module worth exploring: the International module.
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Shay LevySomeone at the office asked me to check why a specific file was failing to execute. When double-clicking the file, nothing happened and no related process could be found in Task Manager.
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Shay LevyWhen troubleshooting WinRM errors, you’ll sometime encounter hex error codes, such as 0x80338104, which don’t say much about the error itself.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. Starting with PowerShell 2.0 we can create new objects and set property values with the Property parameter.
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Shay LevyLet’s say you created a new TimeSpan object by using the Start parameter. PS> $ts = New-TimeSpan -Start 1/1/2014 PS> $ts Days : -324 Hours : -9 Minutes : -44 Seconds : -12 Milliseconds : -596 Ticks : -280286525960331 TotalDays : -324.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. There are times when you need to validate the credentials of an Active Directory user account.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. As system administrators, when troubleshooting an issue, we are often required to take a look at a certain knowledge base article from Microsoft.
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Shay LevySometimes you need to prompt a user for input so you can base your script upon it. The Read-Host cmdlet is made just for that.
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Shay LevyPowerCLI 5.1 Release 2 has now been released and can be downloaded here. Other than bug fixes and new enhancements, the new release supports PowerShell 3.
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Shay LevyPowerShell’s Get-Credential cmdlet lets us create a secure credential object for a specified user name and password using a UI dialog:
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. When you assign the output of a command to a variable, you can’t know in advance how many objects are in the variable.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. When writing commands in PowerShell you can be as formal as: Get-ChildItem -Include*.
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Shay LevyIn a previous tip I showed a new hidden keyboard shortcut to transpose lines of code in the ISE. At the PowerShell Facebook group, Dave Carnahan was wondering if there’s a way to pull all of the ISE related hot keys.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. When working in the ISE editor you sometimes need to rearrange lines of code and move them below or above other lines.
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Shay LevyWindows XP and above allow multiple user accounts to be created on the computer. When the computer is in a workgroup mode and there’s more than one user account defined on that system, Windows will display a Welcome Screen with all available user accounts (as picture icons) , so users can click them to log in into the system.
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Shay LevyIf you list the Environment drive, you’ll find a variable called SESSIONNAME. SESSIONNAME is defined only if the Terminal Services system component is installed.
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Shay LevyChosen from all products reviewed, tested, worked with, explored, and relied on throughout the year, InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year Award winners represent the best of the best for end-users, developers, IT pros, and the businesses they serve.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. When a session is being debugged, PowerShell populates an automatic variable called _$PSDebugContext _which contains an object that has Breakpoints and InvocationInfo properties information about the debugging environment.
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Shay LevyIn the scenic setting of the Museum for Industrial and Social History in Oberhausen, Germany, the first German PowerShell Community Conference will take place on April 10 and 11, 2013.
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Shay LevyWhen we need to resolve addresses, we usually use the System.Net.Dns .NET class methods. In addition to the .NET method, we can also use WMI class–Win32_PingStatus–to achieve this.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. There are times where you’ll want to determine if the session your code is running in is a remoting session.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 and Windows 8 or above. Starting with Windows 8, mounting virtual hard disks or ISO files is not an issue anymore.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0. In PowerShell 3.0 you need to run the Update-Help cmdlet in order to stay up-to-date whenever new help content is available.
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Shay LevyIf you’ve updated PowerShell to version 3.0 you probably noticed that help is no longer shipped in the box. PowerShell 3.
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Shay LevyYou have a collection of values in a variable. When you pipe the variable to the Get-Member cmdlet you get the type and members of each item in that collection.
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Shay LevyWhenever you use Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the result always comes back with a list of system properties. WMI system properties are associated with all classes and instances of classes, and begin with a double underscore.
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Shay LevyThis is the command I had initially in mind when writing the last modified time teaser: ls $pshome\powershell.exe|date I also had this one, which is shorter:
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Shay LevyWorking with CSV files in PowerShell is a common practice. You import the file, loop on its records and you’re good to go.
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Shay LevyBefore we dive into this week’s teaser we would like to announce the winner of last week’s challenge. Ioan Corcodel, congratulations!
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Shay LevySometimes you need to create a copy of an exiting directory structure without copying the files, and you also want to include empty folders if they exist.
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Shay LevySometimes you need to create a file of the specified size, as a placeholder for instance. There are many utilities that do that (e.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 or above. PowerShell has many logging capabilities but sometimes what you want is to capture what’s already written to the console.
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Shay LevyWe’ll use the [adsisearcher] type accelerator. The [adsisearcher] type is just a shortcut to the System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher .NET class. PS> [adsisearcher].FullName System.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. The Get-Content cmdlet returns the contents of a file as an array of strings delimited by a newline character.
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Shay LevyThe Group-Object cmdlet lets you group objects based on the value of a specified property. For example: 1 2 3 4 5 PS> Get-Service | Group-Object -Property Status Count Name Group ----- ---- ----- 93 Stopped {AeLookupSvc, AllUserInstallAgent, AppIDSvc, AppMgmt.
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Shay LevyHello everyone! We are back with a series of Brain Teasers. In the next 3 weeks we will publish one teaser per week.
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Shay LevyThese videos were released yesterday on YouTube. They are part of the Windows Server 2012 Jump Start video series published on Microsoft TechNet.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. PowerShell lets you control how it responds to a non-terminating error (an error that does not stop the cmdlet processing) globally via the $ErrorActionPreference preference variable, or at a cmdlet level using the -ErrorAction parameter.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above. The Send-MailMessage cmdlet enables you to quickly and easily send e-mail message from within Windows PowerShell.
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Shay LevyConsider the following function: function test { $myNumbersCollection = 1..5 if($myNfunction test { $myNumbersCollection = 1..5umbersColection -contains 3) { "collection contains 3" } else { "collection doesn't contain 3" } } By looking at the code it is obvious to the naked eye that the result you should get is: “collection contains 3”.
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Shay LevyIdera, a leading provider of application and server management solutions, today demonstrated its strong commitment to the PowerShell community by making its PowerShell Plus product available for free.
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Shay LevyBruce Langworthy, Senior Program Manager with the Storage and FileSystems team at Microsoft, just posted two new PowerShell modules designed to help with the management and diagnosis of Storage Spaces.
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Shay LevyWith the PowerStatus class we can quickly get the information status of the current system. The PowerStatus class represents information about the current AC line power status, battery charging status, and battery charge status.
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Shay LevyTo convert a number to its equivalent binary string representation, use the Convert.ToString method with a base of 2. PS> [Convert]::ToString(192,2) 11000000 To convert a binary number into its decimal representation, use the Convert.
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Shay LevyPowerShell can convert Hexadecimal numbers on the command line, just prefix the value with ‘0x’: PS> 0xAE 174 Converting a number to HEX requires the use of .
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Shay LevyI’ve been using Windows 8 since its pre-release versions and one of the features I like most in it is – Hyper-V.
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Shay LevyMany Windows PowerShell cmdlets support wildcard characters for their parameter values. For example, almost every cmdlet that has the Name or Path parameter supports wildcard characters for these parameters.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 and above There are many ways to get the age of a file. The most common way is to subtract the file’s LastWriteTime from the current time:
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Shay LevyThe popular PowerShell Cookbook, by Lee Holmes, has reached its 3rd edition and is updated for PowerShell 3.0. The book has not yet been released and is available for pre-order.
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Shay LevyIt’s published! Microsoft PowerShell 3.0 First Look, by Adam Driscoll, is a concise overview of the up and coming features and enhancements to PowerShell.
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Shay LevyNote: This tip requires PowerShell 2.0 and above I have always wanted to see what all PowerShell profiles are defined and in-use on a system.
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Shay LevyIn PowerShell 3.0, we no longer have to import modules manually to use cmdlets. When we run a cmdlet, Windows PowerShell imports the module that contains the command automatically.
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Shay LevyWith the Format-Table cmdlet we format and display a tabular format of an output, We can also select and display output of selected properties of objects.
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Shay LevyWhen working with objects in the console you may have seen a display that resembles the following: PS> Get-Process s* | Select-Object Name,Threads -First 5 Name Threads ---- ------- SearchIndexer {5092, 2732, 1100, 2040.
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Shay LevyWhen you need to create a collection of strings and operate on each of them you’d go with something like:
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Shay LevyThe Windows Explorer Preview Pane can display the contents of text files, graphics, and other file types without having to use external software.
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Shay LevyWindows Management Framework 3.0 was released yesterday. It includes updated management functionality for Windows 7 Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 are not supported).
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Shay LevyIn the previous tip we showed you how to modify WMI object properties using Get-WmiObject cmdlet and the Put method. Today I want to show you another streamlined way to do the same using the Set-WmiInstance cmdlet.
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Shay LevyPowerShell.org is a new community site, led by PowerShell MVPs Don Jones and Kirk Munro, designed to be a general-purpose gathering place and portal for Windows PowerShell, providing discussion forums, technical articles, blog posts, and other resources.
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Shay LevyGetting the content of an object is usually done with the Get-Content cmdlet. For example, getting the content of the Windows hosts file:
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Shay LevyPowerShell MVP Yusuf Ozturk released a project he’s been working on lately – PoSHStats v1.1. PoSHStats is the first free and open source reporting tool of Hyper-V resource metering.
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Shay LevyConsider the following PowerShell 2.0 command: Get-Service -Name wuauserv -ComputerName Server1 | Stop-Service What do you think is happening here? You get the Windows Update service from Server1 and stop it, right?
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Shay LevyPowerShell equivalent of the ping.exe utility is the Test-Connection cmdlet. One of the hidden and less known capabilities of Test-Connection is the abitlity to ping a computer using another computer as the source.
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Shay LevyWhen we use the Get-Module -ListAvailable command to list installed modules, we get a list of modules from two default module locations: one for the system and one for the current user.
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Shay LevyRolf Masuch [MSFT], a former PowerShell MVP, has created the PowerShell Help app for Windows Phone. The app gives you a searchable list of the PowerShell v2 cmdlets.
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Shay LevyIn the previous tip we showed you how to get the next available drive letter using the Get-AvailableDriveLetter function when we want to create a new mapped network drive.
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Shay LevyMapping drives is a routine task for IT pros—you choose a free drive letter, ranging from A-Z, and then use it to map a drive to a specific path.
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Shay LevyWe are very excited about the RTM of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. You know the reason, right? The final version of Windows PowerShell 3.
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Shay LevyRunAs Radio is a weekly Internet audio talk show for IT Professionals working with Microsoft products. The full range of IT topics is covered from a Microsoft-centric viewpoint.
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Shay LevyWorking with PowerShell and Configuration Manager? Check out the Configuration Manager PowerShell SDK website, created by MVP Kaido Järvemet. It is targeted toward Configuration Manager administrators and developers who are looking for How-To examples.
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Shay LevySome of you have noticed that the CTP Workflow PDF guide that was a part of PowerShell 3.0 CTP download is no longer available.
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Shay LevyMicrosoft has updated the Quick Reference Guides page with a new PDF guide: WMI and CIM quick reference. The two page guide describes differences between Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) in Windows PowerShell 2.
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Shay LevyFor those of us who couldn’t make it to Tech Ed this year, you can watch the live stream of today’s sessions HERE (begins at 08:30).
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Shay LevyMicrosoft PowerShell 3.0 First Look, by Adam Driscoll, is a concise overview of the up and coming features and enhancements to PowerShell.
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Shay LevyThe RC version is available for download HERE. You can also find the download link in the Downloads section in the right hand side column of the magazine’s home page.
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Shay LevyThe new book, ”PowerShell for Developers” written by our Editor and PowerShell MVP Doug Finke, is available in early release at a significant discount.
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Shay LevyThe popular free eBook has been updated for PowerShell 2.0. You can read it online. You need to be a PowerShell.
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Shay LevySAPIEN Technologies has announced the immediate availability of PrimalScript 2012, the premiere Scripting Integrated Development Environment, and PowerShell Studio 2012. PowerShell Studio, has all the features of its predecessor, PrimalForms, plus a raft of new features for 2012.
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Shay LevyThe book, by Ed Wilson, the Microsoft Scripting Guy, is available for pre-order (45% off) on Amazon.
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Shay LevyIf you’re working with Office 365 than you may want to check out the Office 365 Helper Scripts package. This package includes a number of helper scripts created during Office 365 deployments.
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Shay LevyWant to test drive the new and improved features of Windows PowerShell? Check out the Windows Server 2012 Beta Virtual Labs page where you can find virtual labs, three of which are on Windows PowerShell!
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Shay LevyThis free guide covers all of the hidden details, configuration tricks, and difficult scenarios involved with Windows PowerShell Remoting. Learn the secret and undocumented tricks to Windows PowerShell Remoting!
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Shay LevyThe other day I was asked to check the local date and time on some workstations in our network. The reason for that was time skew, and as I was told, some workstations’ clock was 1 hour behind.
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Shay LevyCourtesy of TrainSignal (a hat tip to Kasia Lorenc) we are presenting an interview with Ed Wilson conducted at TechEd NA 2011 in Atlanta.
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Shay LevyCourtesy of TrainSignal (a hat tip to Kasia Lorenc) we are presenting an interview with Hal Rottenberg conducted at TechEd NA 2011 in Atlanta.
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Shay LevyThe pre-release version of Microsoft’s Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell Beta 1 has been released. Download it HERE. Script Explorer Beta 1 is a free download and an extension of the content and guidance experience that combines the vast amount of knowledge held in the community with the resources available today from Microsoft.
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Shay LevyBeginning on Monday, March 12, 2012, Ed Wilson, The Scripting Guy, will start a new series of Learn Windows PowerShell Live Meetings titled “Windows PowerShell for the Busy Admin”.
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Shay LevyWindows Management Framework 3.0 – Beta is available for download. Get it HERE. More information on the PowerShell team blog.
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Shay LevyThe Data ONTAP PowerShell Toolkit 1.7 was released! This latest offering of the very popular PowerShell module for managing NetApp storage systems features over 900 cmdlets.
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Shay LevyThe Microsoft Scripting Guys formally announce the 2012 Scripting Games featuring Windows PowerShell. Read the announcement HERE.
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Shay LevyIf you weren’t able to attend “PowerShell Essentials – Become a PowerShell Wiz, Too!” webcast presented by PowerShell MVP and trainer Dr.
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Shay LevyPowerShell MVP Jim Christopher has published a new project on codeplex – SQLite PowerShell Provider. The new provider enables you to use SQLite databases from your PowerShell session by mounting the database as a drive.
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Shay LevyProblem Your task is to write the shortest code to find one of the unused drive letters (excluding a,b and c).
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Shay LevyWindows PowerShell workflows consist of a set of activities that run in sequence or in parallel and perform long-running, complex management tasks, such as multimachine application provisioning.
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Shay Levy/n software, the makers of NetCmdlets, is offering a FREE NetCmdlets Workstation License_._ NetCmdlets extend the features of Microsoft Windows PowerShell with a broad range of network management and messaging capabilities.
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Shay LevyJoin the UK PowerShell User Group virtual meeting at Thursday, Dec 15, 2011 7:30 PM (GMT), and discover how to use the WSMAN cmdlets to retreive WMI information and see a demo of the new WMI API’s CIM cmdlets in PowerShell v3 CTP 2.
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Shay LevyIn this webcast, Mike Pfeiffer , a Microsoft Exchange MVP, shows how you can take control of your messaging environment using the Exchange Management Shell.
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Shay LevyThe PowerShell team has announced the release of Windows Management Framework 3.0 CTP2. The new build contains Windows PowerShell 3.0, WMI and WinRM, and is available to be installed on Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.
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Shay LevySome PowerShell wallpapers I created over the years to decorate my desktop and wanted to share them with you. If you have some of your own that you want to share with the community, send them over and we’ll add them to this page.
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Shay LevyWassim Fayed [MSFT] has published the source code for the Cmdlet Help Editor on CodePlex. Cmdlet Help Editor enables you to create help topics for Windows PowerShell cmdlets and in the XML format that Windows PowerShell reads.
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Shay LevyWindows 8 Developer Preview (pre-beta version) was released for public at the BUILD conference (you can download it HERE) and it is packaged with PowerShell v3 and a ton of goodies!
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Shay LevyWhen it comes to finding old files in PowerShell we have several options, all in which involve subtracting DateTime objects or using comparison operators.
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Shay LevyThe Experts Conference 2011, Europe will be hosting the PowerShell Deep Dive. The PowerShell team has announced the first 8 session abstracts for the PowerShell Deep Dive in Frankfurt.
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