Some more PowerShell books are becoming available – this is a very exciting time!

First, there’s Don Jones & Jeffrey Hicks’ PowerShell: TFM
Second, there’s Jerry Lee Ford Jr.’s Microsoft Windows Powershell Programming for the Absolute Beginner

Congrats on a huge milestone, and thank you for your contribution!

On January 1, 2006, many companies began to offer the Roth 401(k): an alternative to the traditional 401(k) that allows you to contribute your money in after-tax dollars, rather than pre-tax dollars. Most (in my opinion incorrectly) summarize the difference as the following choice: “If you think you might be in a higher income tax bracket when you withdraw the funds, invest in the Roth 401(k). Otherwise, invest …

In writing, overly-ambitious goals often mean not writing at all.

It sounds odd, but it’s true. Take most tumbleweed-ridden, ghost-town technical blogs. From my experience, the vast majority of them have authors that are working on this educational, pedagogical masterpiece – but their Magnum Opus sits in a half-finished Word document on their hard drive somewhere.  All of the sudden, the joy of writing begins to …

Well, after a long holiday break, the first thing on both of our minds, naturally, is filtering on the Certificate Provider.

A suggestion came up recently in an internal discussion list to add more dynamic parameters to Get-ChildItem when you’re in the certificate provider. For example, the –CodeSign parameter is extremely useful:

[cert:\]
PS:2 > dir -rec -codesign

    Directory: …

Here’s one thing you might have noticed happening to your Outlook calendar. As time goes on, the calendar titles get obscured by the ugly meeting barnacles such as “FW: " and “Updated: “. I don’t know anybody that cares about that meta-data, but it lives on – and I’d like to remove it.

Omar Shahine mentioned that he wrote an Outlook addin to do this once. Since I’ve been …

If you missed the TechTalk radio interview (but wanted to hear it,) I’ve uploaded it here: http://www.leeholmes.com/projects/techtalk/techtalk_12-10-2006.mp3. Thanks, Tom, for an interesting interview!

One of the more common questions we get from people interested in PowerShell is “how do I get started?” They see  examples of PowerShell weilding its considerable strength, and are often intimidated by a perceived learning curve. It doesn’t have to be that way, though — PowerShell is easy to start playing with, and easy to continue learning.

First of all, you’ll want to download PowerShell. If you …

To give a glimpse into the writing process behind my upcoming “Windows PowerShell - The Definitive Guide” (O’Reilly,) I’ll occasionally post entries “as the author sees it.”  This entry discusses PowerShell’s type extension files.

Add Custom Methods and Properties to Types

Problem

You want to add your own custom properties or methods to all objects of a certain type.¶

Solution

Use …

Today, we have a guest post from Michael Murgolo. He’s developed a PowerShell Prompt Here powertoy (like the one we all know and love,) but this one doesn’t suffer from the uninstall bug that the current CMD Prompt Here powertoy (or its derivatives) do. And the explanation is awesome, to boot.

An Old PowerToy is New Again

by Michael Murgolo

PowerShell PowerToys Download

One of the most popular Windows …

A few minutes ago, Bob Muglia and Jeffrey Snover at IT Forum announced something at we’ve long been waiting for – the official Release to Web (RTW) of Windows PowerShell v1.0!

In late December of 2002, PowerShell entered the public eye when a Slashdot reader stumbled upon a job posting for “Microsoft’s Next Generation Shell”. About a year later, we officially announced the project (code-named …