Lee Holmes

When O’Reilly put up the overview page for the Windows PowerShell Cookbook, the sample chapter was originally “Looping and Flow Control.” While a useful chapter in its own right, it didn’t really highlight the solution-oriented focus the book takes.

They’ve now updated the sample chapter to one much more representative: Environmental Awareness.

The goal of this chapter is to help you work with the global environment …

A question recently came up asking why the -eq operator doesn’t work for two different (but equal) SecureStrings.

By default, almost all environments (the .NET Framework included) test if two things are exactly the same – that they are stored in the same place in memory. This is called reference equality.

[D:\documents\WindowsPowerShell]
PS:14 > $test = Read-Host -AsSecureString
**** …

I’m not particularly a drum fan, but this is an amazing feat of skill and technology.

Since I injured my middle left finger playing Guitar Hero 2 way too much when it came out, I’ve been dying to get back to playing it. … so I thought “wouldn’t it be great to be able to play Guitar Hero on the drums?” So I thought about how that might be accomplished… researched, implemented, …

The ACoupleOfAdmins blog recently posted a book review of the PowerShell Cookbook (and were kind enough to also write an Amazon Review.) They bring up some excellent points. Mainly,

The Windows PowerShell Cookbook will stay on my shelf as a reference book (for the code samples), but I would look to other resources first (e.g. Windows PowerShell In Action by Bruce Payette), if you need a resource to help learn …

A question came up on the newsgroup recently about why Exchange changes PowerShell’s execution policy from “Restricted” to “RemoteSigned.” Doesn’t that lower PowerShell’s security?

The “Restricted” execution policy isn’t intended to be something that PowerShell users live with forever. It’s a safe default that protects non PowerShell users from being impacted by PowerShell-based malware.

For …

Here’s a nice light-hearted video if you need a laugh :)

Video: William laughing

Since we just released a CTP of PowerShell V2, I thought I’d share a handy little script to demonstrate one of the new APIs we introduced: Show-ColorizedContent.ps1.

This CTP introduces a new tokenizer API that lets you work with PowerShell script content the same way that our parser does – as a collection of items (tokens) that represent the underlying structure of that script Until now, any tool that …

Scott Hanselman and I recently chatted about using PowerShell for a bit of log analysis. The majority of his solution (in green) ended up being quite elegant, flowing into a pipeline nearly as easily as you might speak it:

PS C:\> $re =[regex]"\d{2}(?=[_.])"; import-csv file.csv |
    select File, Hits, @{Name="Show";Expression={$re.matches($_.File)[0] } } |
    sort Show -desc | group Show | …

Update 8/16/2010: The much expanded second edition is now available.

As just announced by O’Reilly, the PowerShell Cookbook is now available!

As your experience grows in any technology, you learn and benefit from the combination of two distinct types of knowledge:

1. What can I do with the technology?
2. How do I accomplish a specific task in that technology?

Question #1 focuses on the technology. You learn the answers to #1 …

When you’ve got to deal with as much information as everybody in a large company does, most people write Inbox rules to redirect DLs to their own sub-folders. They then group the folder “By Conversation,” which lets them quickly read the threads of interest. But most importantly, it lets them ignore the ones that do not.

If you don’t yet use these techniques to help you manage your own mail, you will love yourself for …