The Outlook team has a tradition of putting calendar diagrams in their OOF messages to try and help clarify the date ranges. In a recent mail to an Outlook-heavy DL, about 50% of the OOF messages I got back contained these mini OOF calendars, so they must find them helpful.
I asked if it was a new-fangled feature in O14, but in fact they do it by hand! (I wonder if they book vacation time for hand-crafting the OOF …
Read moreOnce you get passionate enough about PowerShell to start looking for swag, you know you have a problem. Unfortunately, there is very little available in that regard. If you haven’t seen /n Software’s sticker yet, here’s a bunch of people that picked one up while the promo was live. I haven’t seen anything calling out the end to the promo, but the page generates an error when you visit now.
If that still doesn’t …
Read moreOnce you’ve been using PowerShell for awhile, it’s natural to want to spread the word. We frequently get questions asking for a standard “Introduction to PowerShell” slide deck, but haven’t really had one to share. The problem is that they tend to be pretty customized to the audience – even a “standard intro talk” becomes much more engaging when you target it to a specific audience.
However, those customizations tend …
Read moreA question came up on an internal discussion list today about how to let a cmdlet support both simple and detailed views. For example, a –Detailed flag to tell the cmdlet to emit additional information during the request.
The original approach was to do all of this filtering inside of the cmdlet. When –Details is not specified, run through some additional code to remove the extraneous properties.
The goal is noble, but …
Read moreOne of the biggest accomplishments in getting your private pilot’s license is the “Solo Long Cross-Country.” It marks the home-stretch of a lot of training, practice maneuvres, landing drills, and solo flights of increasing complexity.
This flight is where it all comes together: 150 nautical miles total, landing at a minimum of 3 airports, with one leg at least 50 nautical miles.
I planned this flight …
Read moreOne bit of feedback we frequently get is that PowerShell’s learning curve has some steeper bumps than we would like. Or simply, is strongly affected by habits learned from other languages or shells.
Interestingly enough, many of these problems aren’t new to us – we just don’t have a good way (aside from help) of exposing them to the user. This was something I touched on in the footnotes of a …
Read moreOne tension that sometimes arises in the PowerShell community is between the hard-core developers, and hair-on-fire administrators. As a broad technology, this tension and desire for balance drives our design decisions every day.
PowerShell is all about striking a balance between a range of experiences:
Pain is Temporary
… Quitting lasts Forever.
I hadn’t heard this before yesterday, but it makes a good quote for the whiteboard!
Once problem that often arises when trying to manage machines is when the management layer itself is the thing you need to diagnose. For example, trying to diagnose Remote Desktop connectivity issues when port 3389 is blocked, or using PowerShell Remoting when WSMAN is misconfigured.
Alternatively, you might not have the client you need to manage the machine – such as an SSH client, or a version of PowerShell V2 …
Read moreIf you have a PowerShell script that you are calling from cmd.exe, you might run into the following error:
Write-Host : The OS handle’s position is not what FileStream expected. Do not use a handle simultaneously in one FileStream and in Win32 code or another FileStream. This may cause data loss.
This is bug in PowerShell V1 and V2, and happens when:
