Scripting Blog

A place to learn about PowerShell and share stories of automation

PowerShell PowerTip: Grabbing the location your script lives in

One super common thing in PowerShell is to design a script to consume particular files for data. Often times you are building the script right in the folder for your files. However, it can be annoying to give long, literal file paths to a file. Also, if you give that script to someone else, they need to edit that path to point at the right ...

Working with JSON data in PowerShell

Welcome back everyone! This week we will take another look at some common data types we might encounter in the real world: JSON data. JSON data is used pretty frequently on the web if you're hitting APIs. This not only includes external data (twitter, weather, marvel database), but often includes internal data to your company. It's nice to ...

PowerShell PowerTip: ISE crashing and auto complete not working

Hi all, I'm going to start putting out these short PowerShell PowerTips every so often. They won't be full blog posts, but they will be short and useful! Have you been having issues with the ISE crashing and not auto completing since windows update 1803? From what I've seen there is a fix for this coming, but if you need these features ...

Doing more with functions: Verbose logging, Risk mitigation, and Parameter Sets

Welcome back to PowerShell for Programmers, this week I'm trying gitGist again for the code blocks. Let me know what you think about it vs the normal syntax highlighter I use :) As we've seen in the other posts about functions, attributes are a really cool thing to extend the features we have available to ourselves and for our users. This ...

Grabbing Excel (XLSX) values with PowerShell

The Goal: Import data from XLSX files conveniently like import-csv lets you do with simpler data. The preamble: Excel is a mainstay of the business world at this point, which means a lot of the data you might have to work with will come at you as an XLSX file or need to be one. This can be a bit annoying when scripting. If we're just ...