As people begin to explore PowerShell, the question often comes up – “Will PowerShell support the cmdlet or language feature <foo>?”
For example (from the newsgroup,) “Is there a way to get the unmodified contents of a file – since Get-Content splits it into lines?” Or from Occasionally Rabid Programmer, “… Is there a zipping PowerShell class yet?” For many of these questions, …
Read moreA question came up today on the newsgroup asking why the following didn’t work:
PS >$secureString = ConvertTo-SecureString "Hello"
ConvertTo-SecureString : Cannot process argument because the value of argume
nt "input" is invalid. Change the value of the "input" argument and run the
operation again.
At line:1 char:39
+ $secureString = ConvertTo-SecureString <<<< …The PowerShell range operator allows you to generate lists of numbers out of more compact expressions:
PS >1..5
1
2
3
4
5
PS >6..4
6
5
4
Something that came up on the newsgroup was the desire for range operators on data types other than the numeric ones. It’s a feature we wanted to add, but weren’t able to. In the meantime, this script / function accomplishes the goal quite well:
PS >range Friday Monday …Over the past few days, the Exchange team has been demo-blogging features of their new administrative interface. The power is obvious, and the benefit it brings to administrators is palpable.
They’ve built their entire administration surface on PowerShell cmdlets, so today’s post really ties the series together nicely.
They go through 14 of their most common scenarios with screen shots to illustrate all of the GUI …
Read moreA question came up recently in the newsgroup, asking why adding seemingly different items to an ArrayList resulted in the ArrayList being full of the same item:
PS >$table = new-object Collections.ArrayList
PS >$row = 1 | select Col1,Col2,Col3
PS >$row.Col1 = "Column 1"
PS >$row.Col2 = "Column 2"
PS >[void] $table.Add($row)
PS >$row.Col1 = "Column 1, again"
PS >$row.Col2 = …One of my favourite internal blogs has long been Terry Zink’s blog on spam analysis and fighting – from the perspective of somebody working on the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services team.
After some prodding by me (and probably others,) his blog is now public!
And to make things even better, he’s Canadian :)
Something extremely helpful in learning a technology such as PowerShell is a pocket guide and quick reference. It doesn’t necessarily replace a structured tutorial as a learning resource, but fills an important role as a daily desktop reference.
Over the last while, I’ve been working with O’Reilly to create such a guide – as the most ambitious addition to their “Short Cuts” program to date.
The reference will be …
Read moreJim Truher just posted a script that he’s been polishing for the last few months – Background “jobs” and PowerShell. It’s awesome, and one of the first things that people ask for once they start settling in to PowerShell.
What I love about being surrounded by a bunch of other PowerShell geeks is watching scripts like this come together. If I remember correctly, this script started off …
Read moreProbably the most useful network tool on any operating system is Telnet. Not for connecting to Telnet servers, of course, as the Telnet protocol is about as insecure as they come. Instead, it’s useful for debugging connection problems with arbitrary ports and arbitrary protocols.
Debugging an HTTP problem? You can Telnet into port 80 to help you resolve it.
Debugging a mail retrieval issue? You can Telnet into port …
I’ve always loved Scott’s ultimate list of tools. To make things even better, PowerShell now plays a big part in this year’s list :)
To add to the list, here are the first tools (not covered by Scott) I add to my systems:
Start | Control Panel | Regional Settings | … | Dvorak
Setting my system to the Dvorak keyboard layout is one of the first things I do on my non-work computers. Typing feels much more efficient and …
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