PowerShell Team

Automating the world one-liner at a time…

Get-MarkupTag

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 ...

Advanced Functions and Test-LeapYear.ps1

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...

More Advanced Functions – Get-Assembly and Get-ExportedType

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 ...

PowerShell V2: ParameterSets

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 ...

Windows PowerShell CTP2 to CTP3 Conversion Guide

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...

Dreaming In PowerShell V2 : Lottery Numbers with Get-Random

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 ...

Mount-SpecialFolders.ps1

The other day I showed you how you can use ENUMs.  I showed an example of how you can find all the SPECIALFOLDERs on a system.  Here is a script that I call Mount-SpecialFolders.ps1 which mounts all your special folders as PowerShell drives.   # Mount-SpecialFolders.ps1 # param($Folder="*", [SWITCH]$Verbose...

Explore Your [Environment]

This topic is a little long but I strongly encourage you to walk through it and master the techniques it illustrates.  I can assure you that you'll will use them a couple thousand times in the next couple of years. .Net provides a wonderful class called System.Environment that tells you all about your environment.  It is well worth ...

Gesticulating Ben Pearce

I gave a talk with Ben Pearce during IT Forum in Barcelona this year.  It was the first time I had ever given a talk with Ben as was shocked (and delighted) by his speaking style.  Ben is an awesome presenter.  Full Stop.  That said, one of his presentation techniques is to use of very energetic, very large, very ...