Pipelining is an important concept in PowerShell. Though the idea did not originate with PowerShell (you can find it used decades earlier in Unix, for example), PowerShell does provide the unique advantage of being able to pipeline not just text, but first-class .NET objects. Pipelining has several …
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 …
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, …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
