If you're like me, you've got a browser favorites folder that is full of wonderful PowerShell code snippets. Ideally, it would be great to have a way to bring those favorite snippets into PowerShell so that my favorites folder becomes a code library. Doing this presents several challenges. The first (and easiest to solve) is getting the web page t...
On my personal blog (Media And Microcode), I've been posting a series called "Scripting the Web", which introduced a function called Get-MarkupTag. Get-MarkupTag is a very handy little function that coerces individual tag elements of a web page into HTML, so you can scrape data from a webpage. I've updated Get-MarkupTag a tiny bit for CT...
Welcome to CTP3! There are just an amazing amount of really important features in V2 but the one I want everyone to start using ASAP is Advanced Functions. In CTP2 we called this cmdlets. We dropped that term in favor of taking the idea of a FUNCTION and just making it more and more capable. It is a bit of a misnomer in that...
Tyson Kopczynski has just published a great article Fun with PowerShell 2.0 Eventing! That inspired to to write a script to automatically backup my modules directory. I'm doing a lot of scripting this week and I don't want to lose my work if I make a mistake. I thought I would write a scripting using PowerShell 2.0 Eventing to wat...
One of the great benefits of PowerShell V2 Advanced Functions is the ease in which you can support parametersets. ParameterSets are, well, different SETS of valid parameters. For instance you can say: Get-Process -id 0 Get-Process -Name *ss Those are 2 different parametersets for the Get-Process cmdlet. Here is an example of how...
I write a lot of scripts, and, since I blog some of what I write, my home computer has been running Windows PowerShell CTP2 since it came out. Since CTP3 has a number of changes from CTP2, I've got to update my home script library to work with CTP3. While this guide might not have every change that happened in between CTP2 and CTP3 (bec...
Tobias Weltner writes a blog called Dreaming In PowerShell, and he recently posted a way to get a list of unique lottery numbers with PowerShell. Dreaming In PowerShell is a cool blog, and the post is interesting, but it makes an assertion that's no longer true in V2. He uses System.Random to create the random numbers because he asserts...
I was writing a demo yesterday and needed a quick and dirty way to generate some XML so I wrote the function below. This highlights a couple of changes that are coming up in CTP3 that I thought I would preview. 1) The keyword "cmdlet" is going away and we'll just have "function". Notice that now you can sp...
