PowerShell Team

Automating the world one-liner at a time…

Windows PowerShell & Microsoft Management Console (MMC) ISV Workshop

Dear Valued Microsoft Customer,  You are invited to attend the Windows PowerShell & Microsoft Management Console (MMC) ISV Workshop (Building Next Generation Command Line and GUI Applications on Windows) on April 18th & 19th 2007.  This is a free two-day event, located on the Microsoft Campus, Redmond, WA.  This in-depth briefing ...

Note on Performance

Vinicius Canto posted a comment regarding the performance of the QL function that I posted in my Year of the Pig Revisited – the magic of QL blog post. He found that this function was 16x slower than creating an array using the form: @("Pig", "Rat", "Ox"). That is good to know and if you have a script which you need to speed up, this is one...

Software Inventory

Otto Helweg has started a blog called Management Matters that I think you'll enjoy. He just posted an entry about how to use PSINFO (from SysInternals) and PowerShell to do a quick and dirty software inventory and displaying the results to a screen or storing them in a database. Give it a read – it's cool stuff.  Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]...

Internet Radio Function

I found a cool blog entry at http://hung-yuwu.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!744FB258BF8C8020!1377.entry . I have no idea what it says but I can read the script and I like it. The person has an internet radio site that they like and wrote a simple script to get run it in an IE windows with a fixed size and location and without all the IE adornments...

Functions vs Filters

In my previous entry, I referred to Rsbohn's blog PowerShell $Profile and his function to slow down output function slowly ($tempo=100) { process { $_; Start-Sleep -milliseconds $tempo}} This is a good candidate for a FILTER. A filter is function that just has a process scriptblock. So you could have written his as: filter slowly ($tempo=...

Start-Demo: Help doing demos using PowerShell

A couple a weeks ago I got a call from BillG's Technical Assistant (TA) telling me that Bill and Ray (Ozzie) wanted to get a demo of the new stuff we were doing with PowerShell. The setting was Bill's conference room that would be organized with a number of Demo stations. You'd get called in and were allowed to bring one other person but then ...

Improved PowerShell grammar Documentation

Bruce Payette is a co-designer of the PowerShell language and the development lead for its implementation. From that, you might guess that his book: Windows PowerShell in Action would provide a great explanation of the language and how to use it – you'd be right. In the past, we've posted a PowerShell grammar document but a number of you ...

Year of the Pig Revisited – the magic of QL

Richard Siddaway has a blog entry showing how to calculate the Chinese Horoscope using PowerShell. His solution uses hashtables: ## create hash table $years = @{1="Rat"; 2="Ox"; 3="Tiger"; 4="Rabbit"; 5="Dragon"; 6="Snake";            7="Horse"; 8="Goat"; 9="Monkey"; 10="Rooster"; 11="Dog"; 0="Pig"} ## get the year of...