PowerShell: Taking Some Time Off I'll be taking a two-week break from my weekly PowerShell column here to relax and enjoy the holidays with my family. See you next year!

PowerShell: Output Options One of PowerShell's truly amazing capabilities is its ability to convert objects into a variety of useful formats for reporting, archiving, sharing data, and more. Here's a fast rundown of the many built-in options; to use any of them, just pipe your objects to the output cmdlet, as in: Get-Service

Jeff Hicks’ PowerShell WMI Wizard Jeff Hicks has pulled off a masterstroke, using nothing but PowerShell and SAPIEN's free PrimalForms dialog box builder to create a graphical "WMI Wizard" for Windows PowerShell. If you use PowerShell, you simply must check this out. This shows the power and flexibility of Windows PowerShell. Sure, it's not something

PowerShell: Happy Holidays The holidays are upon us, and it's time to revisit an oldie-but-goodie from the TechNet Script Center - "Jingle Bells," done in Windows PowerShell. Seriously. Get the code here, and we'll get back to "serious" PowerShell in a few weeks (grin).

The best VBScript site you never saw (PowerShell, too) This is easily one of the best VBScript/PSH resources I've seen - and I'm annoyed that I've taken so long to discover it. Stupid Google. Just check out the enormous repository of error numbers and their true meanings, and the scripting eZine (which is free). Wow. Windows Server 2008, Exchange

PowerShell: PowerTab This is PowerTab. Get it now. It's free, and it really helps make using PowerShell easier by providing command completion ("IntelliSense", only text-based, not graphical pop-up menus) within Windows PowerShell. That's it. Easy tip this week - if you're not using PowerTab, you're working to damned hard.

PowerShell: Target Computers from AD Need to execute a command against every computer in a domain? Easy: Here's how to do it using nothing more than what's built into PowerShell: $strFilter = "computer" $objDomain = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry $objSearcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher $objSearcher.SearchRoot = $objDomain $objSearcher.SearchScope = "Subtree" $objSearcher.PageSize = 1000 $objSearcher.Filter = "(objectCategory=$strFilter)" $colResults =

PowerShell: Dates and Times There's often times when you'll need to work with dates. Perhaps you're archiving information and need to establish a cutoff date, or perhaps you're examining dates from AD and need to calculate how many days it's been since a certain date. PowerShell generally makes it pretty easy to do. Need

Don’t Fear the Shell (Exchange) The always-super Ilse Van Criekinge, author of Managing Exchange Server with Windows PowerShell, is now appearing in a video from Tech-Ed Europe. Watch it.

PowerShell: Here-Strings Sometimes you need to work with really long string data - and it can seem like a pain in the neck. For example, suppose you want to construct an HTML table, and you want to use a template: $template = "<tr>`n" $template += " <td>{0}</td>`n"$template += "<td>{1}</td>`n" $template += "</tr>`n"

BetaNews | Win2008 R2 Server Core will Run PowerShell v2 I said it would happen. The reason PowerShell isn't supported on Win2008 Server Core is because the Server Core team couldn't take on the full .NET Framework as a liability. Although PowerShell itself doesn't need the whole Framework, the Framework wasn't designed to be broken down. Enter R2. Not only

Graphical PowerShell Apps See Jeff's Scripting Blog Plus for more information - SAPIEN has released "PrimalForms," which is a graphical UI designer that emits PowerShell script code. So you visually design your GUI, and then PrimalForms translates that into the PowerShell code necessary to actually create the GUI. PrimalForms doesn't need to be

PowerShell: The Formatting Rules Why does PowerShell sometimes display data as a list, and sometimes as a table? Try running these three commands: Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem Get-Service Get-Process One is a list, the other is a table. Why? And why were those particular properties displayed? When PowerShell needs to display objects, it follows a precise,

Weekly Shell: When PowerShell Fails, and How MS is Fixing It It should come as no surprise that I'm a big fan of PowerShell. So it may come as a surprise that I recognize several failings in the shell - and it may come as a bigger surprise that Microsoft's PowerShell product team agrees with me on a lot of them.

Weekly Shell: STOP SCRIPTING THIS INSTANT! I sometimes have to laugh about the reasons admins will give me for not adopting Windows PowerShell. For example, one fellow at a conference told me that he didn't want to learn to script. He then turned around later in the class and belted out this Cmd.exe doozy: FOR /F