PSStandardMembers – The Stealth Property

PowerShell TeamFebruary 18, 2010Feb 18, 201002/18/10

Today I got the question

I’ve looked into all of my.format.ps1xml files but I can’t find out where Format-List is getting its default view for, say, System.Diagnostics.Process:
PS> ps |select -first 1 |fl
Id      : 7616 Handles : 543 CPU     : 10.6860685 Name   

Windows Management Framework Install Failure and Investigation

PowerShell TeamFebruary 15, 2010Feb 15, 201002/15/10

Since Windows Management Framework was released Oct. 2009, our customers have been excited about using PowerShell 2.0 on down-level OSes. Meanwhile, we also received feedback from both internal and external customers about our product issues. One of them is WMF install failure followed by the mysterious “The update does not apply to your system” error message.

Building on PowerShell: Execution Policies

PowerShell TeamFebruary 12, 2010Feb 12, 201002/12/10

One question we sometimes get asked is why Exchange changes PowerShell’s execution policy from “Restricted” to “RemoteSigned.” Doesn’t that lower PowerShell’s security?
The “Restricted” execution policy isn’t intended to be something that PowerShell users live with forever. It’s a safe default that protects non PowerShell users from being impacted by PowerShell-based malware.

Workaround to Catch Exceptions from Import-CliXml

PowerShell TeamFebruary 11, 2010Feb 11, 201002/11/10

Recently, I came across an interesting bug in PowerShell. Let’s create a repro.
First, we create a string “a” and generate an xml based representation of it using the Export-Clixml cmdlet. Since we need to have the class id, we pipe the string to format-table as shown in the example below.

Viewing Junctions with ‘dir’

PowerShell TeamFebruary 9, 2010Feb 9, 201002/9/10

One feature of the NTFS file system is the junction, which is similar to a short cut but works at the file system level. This lets you link one directory to another. There’s a tool called ‘junction’ available here that lets you manipulate junctions.