My command seems to behave differently depending on how many items were returned. This is something that the PowerShell Team hears from the community or our internal partners every couple of weeks. This blog post will explain when a Windows PowerShell command returns different types and offer some reasons for why it is done this way. In general,...
No, I’m not talking about our newest rap single. I’m talking about PowerShell’s most hidden gem. The one you can show to most members of even the PowerShell team, and have them gasp – “oh, that’s cool! I gotta remember that!” And it’s not even for lack of documentation! Here are the first few lines of Get-Help about_automatic_variables: PS>...
One of the best ways to learn a technology or take your understanding to the next level is to challenge yourself by entering a contest. Well, here is your opportunity. The Quest Software PowerGUI Challenge contest is currently ongoing and finishes on November 15th, 2010. This contest gives you an opportunity to win a gift ce...
While attending JAOO, I had the great pleasure to meet and talk with Martin Fowler and Neil Ford on the topic of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Channel 9 videotaped that discussion and you can watch it HERE. I'm quite passionate about DSLs - both FOR them and AGAINST them. The details matter! I have this concept called, "Beer Cardi...
The Buddha once said that, “A jug fills drop by drop”. In this case, the jug is universal PowerShell cmdlet coverage which is a really large jug! We’ve never been confused on this point – I’ve often referred to it as the “30 year hole” that we needed to dig ourselves out of. When PowerShel...
We often get the question of what to do about a cmdlet that has lots of parameters. Do you break it up into multiple commands or just have a single cmdlet with lots of parameters. Here is the way I think about it: If you have to enter 100 things to get a job done, it doesn’t really matter whether you enter those 100 things via 1 cmdlet...
Intel has released version 1.0 of their Intel Core vPro PowerShell Module. This set of cmdlets do Out-of-Band hardware management of devices that are equipped with the vPro chip. What that means is that you can do a certain amount of management on devices that don’t have an OS or whose OS is hung (if you are using one of our competitor’s OSes .. ...
Efran Cobisi has published a PowerShell V2 book in Italian. The title is “Windows PowerShell 2.0 – Guida completa” and is a 448 pages long. Efran describes it as “a collection of theory, insides and hints on the scripting environment, the programming language and the most used cmdlets. It’s targeted to both developers and IT professionals and con...
Designing useable cmdlets is part engineering and part art. It’s not an easy task to define the conceptual boundaries of a cmdlet (where does one cmdlet end and the next begin) or to provide great feature control without inundating the user with parameters. However, you can improve the usability of your cmdlets by avoiding two common paramete...
The motivation Let’s say that you want to retrieve and modify a list in a SharePoint site, but you don’t have access to Microsoft.SharePoint.dll. One possible solution is to try to search online or ask someone to let you copy the dll. If you are able to get a hold of it, you will quickly realize that the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll has some depende...
