January, 2009

James O’Neil just posted how to manage Windows Update with Windows PowerShell Here’s a quick sample of what he can do: Add-WindowsUpdate –Auto to download updates and reboot if needed, Set-WindowsUpdateConfig –n 4 –i to schedule updates (Including the...

Dozens of people could write dozens of books on all of the cool stuff we improved in V2 of PowerShell.  One of the nice little things we did was give a more understandable API than Pipeline (which is the class you can use to invoke code from C# in...

Shane Burton from Compellent just asked me to help him rename a drive with PowerShell. It's possible to rename drives using a couple of different WMI classes, Win32_Volume , and Win32_LogicalDisk . You change the drive by setting a property name on the...

If you have used Windows Server 2008, probably you had experience with managing server features. Server Manager is a traditional way to install/uninstall server features. On Windows 2008 Server R2 Beta , Windows PowerShell provides a new approach to managing...

Cmdlets are high level, task-oriented abstractions. The implementation of cmdlets can talk to anything: Web services, COM objects, WMI objects, .NET objects – anything. Depending upon how developers design their API, they can make it easier or harder...

Ye110wbeard did it again. Check THIS out.  Loads of fun.   Experiment! Enjoy! Engage! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows Management Partner Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell Visit...

I was in a meeting yesterday talking about BITS and what an awesome service it was.  I described what it did and how it allowed people to avoid a wide range of low-class, pain in the butt problems.  The question then became, "why isn't...

Hi writers and consumers of buggy scripts. This post explains the basics of the Graphical Debugger in the ISE. There’s a lot of good stuff, with some tips and tricks. The debugger support got the cmdlets and user interface. The cmdlets include Enable...

Today, on our internal discussion list, someone asked if there were any advantages to testing with PowerShell versus testing with C#. I was able to come up with 10 quick reasons to test with PowerShell: Being able to run command line programs easier within...

On the front page of MSN.com today, there’s details about a new worm, Conficker , that spreads using the good old fashioned autorun.inf tricks.  It infects USB drives so that, when you plug the drive into another computer, it automatically runs and...

Lilia Gutnik has posted a blog entry HERE showing an example of the Windows 7 Group Policy cmdlets.  Check it out.   Experiment!  Enjoy!  Engage! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT] Windows Management Partner Architect Visit the Windows PowerShell...

Andy Schneider (from Get-PowerShell.com ) recently asked me how he could make sure that everyone at Avanade could get a consistent set of modules. I run into a somewhat similar problem here at Microsoft, where I want to take scripts I've built to work...

I’m going to be doing a PowerScripting Podcast tonight @ 9PM EST.  There’s a live chat room where you can ask questions and pick the brains of a tester / avid scripter on the PowerShell team. It should be fun.  I hope to see your questions there...

Windows 7 has a cool new extensible troubleshooting framework which is entirely based on PowerShell scripts.  Rafael Rivera has written a very good step-by-step guide for how to author a Win7 Troubleshooting Pack HERE . Check it out. Experiment! ...

Tomorrow evening I'll be doing the Mind Of Root podcast with Steve Murawski to discuss WSMAN.  WSMAN is the new standard management protocol to talk to all sorts of heterogeneous devices and is the protocol that PowerShell Remoting is based upon...

Today let's talk about one of the cool new features of Windows PowerShell V2 - Interactive Remoting. Let’s start with an example: PS> $env:COMPUTERNAME # Check local computer name. VLADIMIA64 PS> Enter-PSSession Vladimia06 # Remote to other computer...

UPDATED Feb-03-2009: Lee Holmes has posted an updated version of the script which does a much better job of HTML copy-pasting. It can also produce line numbers and has a number of other improvements.   In the previous article we demonstrated how...

With the release of Win7/WS08R2 beta, we are officially in the end game of PowerShell V2.  This is the phase were we can only respond to customer feedback and we rely upon customer feedback to tell us whether and when we are ready to ship. ...

In a recent comment Peter asked if we could mark blog entries that relate to v2.  We are already doing that with TAGs.  If you look at the bottom of an entry, it will say FILED UNDER and then a set of tags.  We are marking blog entries...

In the previous example we learned how to create a colorized copy of console in HTML and RTF format. However, the output of these scripts cannot be readily used for pasting into web or word processing applications. To insert it into your article in MS...

In the previous post we demonstrated how we can use console host API to capture screen buffer contents as text. But what if we want some colors. Would not it be nice to publish colorized copy of console in HTML or insert it as part of Microsoft Word document...

I just posted a blog about our new File Transfer Cmdlets in which I artfully dodged a difficult question: How do you get the URL to do the file transfer? Sometimes you are going to have it but other times you’ll go to a website and it can be bloody impossible...

Have you had a file copy fail? Does that drive you crazy or what? How about when it is a REALLY big file and it takes a couple of hours and JUUUUUST before it finishes something happens to interrupt the transfer and you have to start all over again. Does...

Everyone needs to get good with Advanced Functions – this is the easiest path to the best semantics for everyone. In previous posts we’ve shown how you can add a few simple attributes and get a TON of stuff for free. There is a LOT more to advanced functions...

Seeing nicely formatted console examples in a previous post has inspired me to write a script that captures the console screen buffer directly from the Windows PowerShell console host. With this script you can make console "screen shots" to...