PowerShell Team

Automating the world one-liner at a time…

Join the PowerShell 10th Anniversary Celebration!

Update: For those of you looking for the videos of this event, you can find all of them on the PowerShell 10 Year Anniversary event page on Channel9. This coming Monday, November 14th, PowerShell will have been shipping for 10 years, so the team is going to celebrate with a day-long event, running from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm (PST). This will ...

What’s in a name? Using prefixes in PowerShell.

We’ve talked about this in the past but it’s time for a reminder.  PowerShell uses prefixes in front of nouns to avoid name collisions.  Imagine how many collisions there would be if people used the noun “USER” directly.  Instead, we have cmdlets *-ADUser, *-VPNUser, and *-RDUser.  The use of the prefix avoids name collisions...

Windows Management Framework V5 Preview

The Windows Management Framework V5 Preview is out! Check out Jeffrey Snover's announcement here. The preview contains updates to PowerShell Desired State Configuration, as well as two new features: NetworkSwitch cmdlets and Windows PowerShell OneGet.  OneGet is designed to dramatically simplify how you discover and install software ...

Only 2 days left to save $1000 on PowerShell Deep Dive registration

There are still a few seats open for the first ever PowerShell Deep Dive Conference and tomorrow is the last day of cheap registration! In case you haven’t already been doing it, now would be a good time to start camping out in your boss’ office begging him/her for the money and time off. Register today or tomorrow for only $850. ...

Finding a URL For File Transfer Cmdlets

I just posted a blog about our new File Transfer Cmdlets in which I artfully dodged a difficult question:  How do you get the URL to do the file transfer?  Sometimes you are going to have it but other times you’ll go to a website and it can be bloody impossible to find the URL that you need to download.  That was the case with...

Transferring (Large) Files Using BITs

Have you had a file copy fail?  Does that drive you crazy or what?  How about when it is a REALLY big file and it takes a couple of hours and JUUUUUST before it finishes something happens to interrupt the transfer and you have to start all over again.  Does that make you want to shove a sharpened #2 pencil up your nose or what? ...

Test-PSCmdlet

Everyone needs to get good with Advanced Functions – this is the easiest path to the best semantics for everyone.  In previous posts we’ve shown how you can add a few simple attributes and get a TON of stuff for free.  There is a LOT more to advanced functions.  You can go VERY VERY far with advanced functions.  I can...

PS> Dir –A D The Screencast

I decided to experiment with a screencast.  This is my first and I have no idea what I’m doing so please forgive me if it sucks.  I’d like to know whether you find this format useful or not and then specific feedback about how to make the screencast better (e.g. I recorded it at 1024x768  - is that good or too large?). In my...

Extending and/or Modifing Commands with Proxies

There are so many powerful features in V2, it is hard to know where to begin.  This one is going to blow to top of your head off when you understand what it enables you to do. In this blog, I talk about Proxy Cmdlets which is the ability for one Cmdlet to call another.  You could always do this but to do it right has always been very...

Diagnosing Here-Strings With PowerShell_ISE

James Brundage posted a blog entry How To Write a Console Application in PowerShell with Add-Type which used a here-string.   One user (lcr) copied and pasted the text and got the following error: Unrecognized token in source text. At line:1 char:72 + Add-Type -OutputType ConsoleApplication -OutputAssembly HelloWorld.exe&#...