PowerShell Team

Automating the world one-liner at a time…

PowerShell Benefits Over COM Scripting

On an internal email thread, someone asked Vivek Sharma why they should implement PowerShell. They knew that PowerShell provided scripting but they had a COM interface which already gave them scripting so the question was – what, if any, were the additional benefits to doing PowerShell. Vivek gave a great answer that I thought I would ...

PowerShell Cheat Sheet – Now in XPS

I originally published Ben Pearce's PowerShell Cheat sheet in Word 2007 format. Given that I posted it a week before the Office 2007 launch, it turned out that not many people could read that so I posted it in PDF format as well. It now turns out that the corporate direction is to use XPS (I'm told that XPS viewers are readily available). ...

Virtual Machine Manager’s PowerShell Support

One of the cornerstone features of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is PowerShell. They have built their entire GUI layered on top of PowerShell in the same way that Exchange 2007 did. A little while ago, I talked to Rakesh Malhotra (the Group Program Manager for SCVMM) about how things were going and he was very pleased with ...

Windows PowerShell 1.0 for Windows Vista

As Jeffery promised to you folks, today we have offically released Windows PowerShell 1.0 for Microsoft Windows Vista. Thanks to everyone for patiently waiting for this release. To download Windows PowerShell 1.0 for Windows Vista, please visit the following links: For more details, please visit the following links: Enjoy Windows ...

Working With WMI Events

PowerShell V1 does not provide native support for WMI events. That doesn't mean that you can't use WMI events with PowerShell, it just means that you need to leverage the .NET classes to do so. This falls into the category of "to ship is to choose". Here is a function that you can use to work with WMI events. This function takes a WMI class ...

Executive Demo

I was in an executive review today where a team was demonstrating their technology (don't ask for details, I won't provide any :-) ).  At some point they brought up this beautiful graphic showing the geographic distribution of resources and then the graph was changing based upon the state of the resources.  We were all drooling like ...

Controlling PowerShell Function (Re)Definition

A question came up in the PowerShell news group recently where someone was asking how they could prevent functions from being redefined.  There are a couple of approaches you can use. First you can make functions read-only or constant. This is pretty straight-forward but does have some downsides. The other approach is to check to see if the...

NetCmdlets Beta 2 is now Available.

nsoftware has released Beta 2 of NetCmdlet, a PowerShell snapin which provides Cmdlets for a wide range of protocols.   The following is from their Release Notes: New In Beta 2 The current release is packed with new features, new functionality, and new Cmdlets for network management and Internet Communications. The following is an ...

PowerShell Cheat Sheet Redux – the PDF version

Attached is a PDF version of Ben Pearce's PowerShell Cheat Sheet.  In the past I've encouraged everyone to speak up and complain if we were messing up or not giving you what you needed.  I'm pleased to see that you have taken this to heart (seriously).   Ben and every other Microsoft employee has been using ...

PowerShell Cheat Sheet

Ben Pearce was gracious enough to put together a good looking PowerShell Cheat Sheet which I've included as an attachment to this blog post.  By definition, a cheat sheet is incomplete so this contains the things that Ben has found to be the most import.   I think you'll find it useful. Cheers! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]...