Windows PowerShell wouldn’t be very useful without all the great cmdlets that actually manage specific technologies.  We want to help cmdlet developers to create high-quality cmdlets.  Today we announce availability of FxCop rules that can be used to verify compliance with some of the Cmdlet Design Guidelines as well as to find some of th...

Back in the days when our hair was on fire with security issues, we brought in a number of industry experts to educate us on developing secure software.  This resulted in the Security Development Lifecycle which all our products now use.  One of the best talks was a from a guy from the NSA who had a talk that was something along the lines...

Sean Kearney (aka Ye110beard of Highway to PowersHell fame ) sent me a pointer to a fun video which posits that maybe W7 is TOO good.  Just maybe it is so good that it will put IT Pros out of business.  I think the exact opposite is true - I think PowerShell and the ability script the OS and products allows IT Pros to generate a ton of va...

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 
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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” er...

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 ...

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. Then, we remov...

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 sub-director...

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:   ·    &n...

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 Slides.zip