Lee Holmes

Ibrahim just posted something to the PowerShell blog about how to create tied variables in PowerShell. If you extend this approach with script blocks, you have a very powerful dynamic scripting technique.

PS C:\temp> cd \temp
PS C:\temp> New-ScriptVariable.ps1 GLOBAL:lee { $myTestVariable } { $GLOBAL:myTestVariable = 2 * $args[0] }
PS C:\temp> $lee
PS C:\temp> $lee = 10
PS C:\temp> $lee
20
PS …

We’ve started working on the next edition of the PowerShell Cookbook, and one obvious goal is to improve on the first version.

As the first version has been in print, I’ve taken notes on where people get confused with certain recipes. I’ve taken notes on what I felt were content gaps, and taken the feedback from reviews on Amazon.com and random blogs. Reviews on Amazon are GOLD for authors. They help …

Once in awhile, you need to do brain surgery on files locked by the system. This is a common problem run into by patches and hotfixes, so Windows has a special mechanism that lets it move files before any process has the chance to get its grubby little hands on it. This can only be done during a reboot, leading to the dire warning given to you by many installers.

The Win32 API that enables this is MoveFileEx. Calling …

I’ve long wondered exactly how few coins you need in your pocket in order to perfectly round out any bill. I usually grab a handful and hope it works out. Even that mathematically astute technique sometimes leaves me a nickel or few pennies short, though, so I settle for making change that gets me a quarter back instead of yet another handful of ore.

Even this settle-for-second-best option isn’t that …

Vladimir Averkin recently wrote a series of posts that show how to export code with syntax highlighting into HTML and RTF formats. It works great in Outlook, but was causing Windows Live Writer to crash. The reason is that the HTML stream of the clipboard isn’t just a blob of HTML – it’s supposed to be placed into the clipboard as CF_HTML. Investigation of that issue gave enough information to exactly pinpoint the …

We frequently get questions asking, “Where can I get a PowerShell script encoder so I can write secure scripts like the Visual Basic Script Encoder?”

The answer is that it is impossible to hide the password from the user if the script ever needs it. This is true of PowerShell, VBScript, C#, C++, Assembly, or any other language. There will always be some point when your script has reversed all of the encryption / …

A while back, Roberto Farah published a script library to help control WinDbg through PowerShell. I’ve been using WinDbg for more debugging lately, and decided (after following one to many object references by hand) that I needed to script my investigations.

PowerDbg is definitely helpful – Roberto has tons of great scripts published that help analyze all kinds of interesting data. It also made me think of an …

In version 1 of PowerShell, it was possible to access Win32 APIs in one of two ways: by generating a dynamic assembly on the fly (you wouldn’t really do this for one-off calls, but would probably do it in a script that makes it easier to invoke Win32 APIs,) or by looking up the P/Invoke definition for that API call, and compiling in-line C# to access it.

These are both good approaches, but we wanted to use the …

One thing that sometimes comes as a surprise (most recently as a comment on the PowerShell blog) is that DateTime casts are always parsed in the en-US DateTime format:

Casting to a DateTime object doesn’t respect the current culture of the thread. For example:

> [Threading.Thread]::CurrentThread.CurrentCulture

LCID  Name

-—  —-

2057  en-GB

> [DateTime] “01/02/03”

02 January 2003

> # Note US date …

When it comes to personal finance, research and reading sometimes can’t answer all of your questions. Especially when it comes to projecting the future, many subtle factors are simply too difficult to easily describe in rules of guidance. Because of this, they tend to be ignored. With interest rates sinking, now’s a good time to evaluate a mortgage refinance. The online calculators help you figure out if it’s right …