PowerShell Team

Automating the world one-liner at a time…

February 2007 - PowerShell Team

Pause

February 25, 2007 Feb 25, 2007 02/25/07
PowerShell Team
In the Newsgroup Microsoft.Public.Windows.PowerShell, BJ Stigall asked what the equivalent of the batch file PAUSE function was in PowerShell. There were lots of good answers that came close but I think the one below comes the closest (and a little bit better). function Pause ($Message="Press any key to continue..."){Write-Host -NoNewLine $...

Supporting -Whatif, -Confirm, -Verbose – In SCRIPTS!

February 25, 2007 Feb 25, 2007 02/25/07
PowerShell Team
<This is a super-important issue so you should definitely start using this in your scripts that you share with others (that have side effects on the system). Please try it out and blog about it to others so that it becomes a community norm. Thanks-jps> One of the greatest things about PowerShell is that when you use a Cmdlet which is ...

NetBeans IDE support for PowerShell

February 25, 2007 Feb 25, 2007 02/25/07
PowerShell Team
Apparently one of the main themes of NetBeans 6.0 is going to be support for scripting languages (yet another indication of the industry wide ascendency of Scripting. It is a VERY good time to embrace scripting or "learn PowerShell and increase your integrated lifetime earnings" J). HERE is a blog entry of someone that added PowerShell ...

Displaying USB Devices using WMI

February 24, 2007 Feb 24, 2007 02/24/07
PowerShell Team
Over on MyItForum.com, I came upon a VBScript in a forum to find all the PNP entities associated with a USBController. I rewrote it in PowerShell and was pretty happy with the results so I thought I would share them. The first thing you need to understand is that the WMI class WIN32_USBControllerDevice describes the connection between USB ...

Extended Types and Types.XSD

February 24, 2007 Feb 24, 2007 02/24/07
PowerShell Team
I'd like to draw your attention to a really important blog entry that Jim Truher recently made: PowerShell Extended Types (Includes a TYPES.XSD). In that entry, he talks about how powerful PowerShell's extended type system is. He is absolutely correct on this point, this is an incredibly important and powerful feature of the system that not ...

Time till we land …

February 23, 2007 Feb 23, 2007 02/23/07
PowerShell Team
<Today we have a guest blog entry from Ed Wilson – Author of the upcoming MSPRESS book, Microsoft Windows PowerShell Step By Step> <2/16 fixed a bug pointed out by Richard Siddaway [use TotalMinutes instead of Minutes for the out-gauge].  Thanks Richard! -jps> I was on my way to Ottawa this week, and working on a few ...

Why isn’t “New-Object” aliased to “New”

February 23, 2007 Feb 23, 2007 02/23/07
PowerShell Team
Alistair Young made a Note to Self : In a standard PowerShell installation, "new" is not an alias for "new-object". You added that. You should therefore know better that to make this kind of dumbass mistake. We talked about making "New" an alias to "New-Object" but decided against it in the end because it leaves open the door for us to provide...

Admin Development Model in Action

February 23, 2007 Feb 23, 2007 02/23/07
PowerShell Team
Ken Taylor has a PowerShell blog over on LiveSpaces. Today he posted a blog entry, Enabling RDP with PowerShell, that had me jumping for joy as a perfect example of the Admin Development Model in action. The whole point of the admin development model is that you use tools to quickly investigate the system and manage it. Ken needed to ...

Leveraging PowerShell Semantics to do More with Less

February 23, 2007 Feb 23, 2007 02/23/07
PowerShell Team
Brad Wilson – the .NET Guy recently posted a set of scripts showing how to drive TortoiseSVN from PowerShell. I thought I would use one of these to highlight how you can leverage the PowerShell semantics to do more with less code. PowerShell is provides Shell semantics and sometimes allows you to ask for more formal, programming, semantics...

“Windows PowerShell in Action” has been released…

February 19, 2007 Feb 19, 2007 02/19/07
PowerShell Team
Since a lot of people have been asking about it, yes - my book "Windows PowerShell in Action" is finally in stock and available on-line from http://amazon.com , http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ as well as directly from the publisher http://manning.com/powershell . It should be available in the store at Barnes and Noble and Borders later this ...