PowerShell Team

Automating the world one-liner at a time…

PSStandardMembers – The Stealth Property

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

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 ...

Building on PowerShell: Execution Policies

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 ...

Workaround to Catch Exceptions from Import-CliXml

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. Here is the content of the xml file. ...

Viewing Junctions with ‘dir’

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. When listing the contents of a directory, by default PowerShell doesn’t tell you which...

Get Localized PowerShell Help Files

The Windows PowerShell core help files that were included in Windows 7 RTM were localized into ten languages. You can download the XML and TXT versions of these localized files and use them in your Windows PowerShell projects. The Windows PowerShell core help files are localized into the following languages:   ·   &...

PDC09 SVR12 and SVR13 Slides

Slides for the two PDC 09 sessions - SVR12 and SVR13 attached. Enjoy Cheers Nana [MSFT] --- Narayanan Lakshmanan [MSFT] DeveloperVisit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx ...

The PowerScripting Centennial

99 podcasts of Pure Power. That’s what the PowerScripting Podcast has been churning out for almost three years! Well, this week is extra special, as you might imagine from the title of this post. On Thursday, they record episode one hundred: a huge milestone by any means. A testament to dedication and passion. Episode #100 looks like it’s...

Use The Right Version of PowerShell.

A number of recent problems that users have reported can be tracked down to using incorrect versions of PowerShell.  Tobias Weltner (of PowerShell Plus fame) blogged the details of issue and want you need to do to ensure you are running the right copies.  The blog title is Are you using the correct PowerShell version?  You ...

PowerShellHostVersion – WTF?

Superstar Shay Levy recently wrote a blog article, Module Manifest Gotcha .  He was exploring the various options that the Module Manifest provides and saw what he thought was a problem with using the PowerShellHostVersion key. PowerShellHostVersion key Specifies the minimum version of the Windows PowerShell host program that works with ...