We recently did a short internal "who are we" video about our organization (MSD). I don't know how it got out into the wild but you can check it out over on YouTube HERE. It's 3 minutes, fun and there are a couple scenes of me saying things that are either really stupid or really clever. (seemed clever at the time but upon v...
A while ago I blogged about the power of Flexible Pipeling Scriptblock parameters. The mechanics of this are quite simple: In a pipeline environment, if you provide a SCRIPTBLOCK to a parameter which does not take a SCRIPTBLOCK or an OBJECT, the PowerShell engine assigns the current pipeline object to the variable "$_", runs t...
Recently one of MVPs, Darren Mar-Elia (Group Policy Guru from SDMSoftware [which as a set of FREE PowerShell GP cmdlets HERE]) was working with our WMI type accelerators and got the following error: $ld = '\\sdmlaptop1\root\cimv2:Win32_LogicalDisk.Caption="C:"' $disk = [WMI] $ld Cannot convert value "\\sdmlaptop1\root\cimv2:Win32_LogicalDisk....
Dino Chiesa has a couple of blogs showing how he was able to get PowerShell running as an "inferior shell" within Emacs. Apparently "inferior shell" is an emacs term of art and not a dig at PowerShell :-). I've always respected the all consuming nature of emacs and the love it has from its users. I used to joke...
Quite a few people have expressed disappointment about the lack of IIS cmdlets or namespace provider. It's been a long sad tale. It turns out that the IIS team (and Sergei Antonov in particular) was one of the first groups to truly "get" PowerShell. I can't tell you how many teams, in the early days, looked at us l...
One of the first things managers of large scale datacenter do is to produce a regular naming scheme for their servers. These often embed the function, location, and then an integer. e.g. IIS-West-001 IIS-West-002 ... IIS-West-234 or ShareP-Tuk-001 ShareP-Tuk-002 ... ShareP-Tuk-010 PowerShell's range operator is a...
Responding to my blog entry on -ErrorAction HERE, Jon Newman reminded me that the reason we didn't use the term IGNORE for -ErrorAction was that we don't really ignore the error. We still record it in $ERROR. He also reminded me that I should have talked about $ErrorActionPreference. This variable defines the action that wi...
Igor Moochnick announced the first release of PASH, an open source implementation of PowerShell. (I tripled check the date on his blog to make sure it really said April 6th and not April 1st. :-) ). This is really exciting stuff. This is one of the most requested items from IT shops that run heterogeneous environments. They ...
Part 2 of my interview for the PowerScripting Podcast is now available HERE. Enjoy! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows Management Partner Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/...
In PowerShell, we draw the distinction between terminating and non-terminating errors. The way to think about the distinction is a what should happen if I pipeline a set of objects to an operation. There are certain errors which mean that there is little to no change that any subsequent object could be processed correctly (for instance ...
