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: Knowing the WMI Server Name Last week, I showed you the WMI system properties that PowerShell can work with. This week, I promised to show you how they can be useful. Here's the scenario: You want to query disk inventory information from multiple computers, and produce some sort of simple, formatted report. You've got the

Weekly Shell: WMI System Properties Try this in PowerShell: Get-WmiObject Win32_Service | Format-List * - see all those funny-looking properties that start with a double underscore? What are those? What good are they? They're called WMI system properties, and you'll typically see them anytime PowerShell's built-in formatting system doesn't have some kind of default set

Weekly Shell: Script vs. Shell A ways back Jeff Hicks blogged about some of the top issues he sees admins having when adopting Windows PowerShell. His #2 pick was "VBScript thinking" in PowerShell, and he's right - if you approach the shell as you would approach VBScript, you're working too hard and not leveraging what

Weekly Shell: Do I need .NET, WMI, COM, and all that to use PowerShell? PowerShell seems, to many administrators, to offer a huge learning curve. Browse the various PowerShell related forums or the PowerShell portion of the blogosphere and you'll see numerous posts that rely on the .NET Framework being used from within PowerShell, posts that rely heavily on byzantine WMI classes, and so

Weekly Shell: PowerShell and WMI’s Future I've been asked a lot about WMI's future now that PowerShell is around. Will WMI be phased out in favor of PowerShell cmdlets? The answer is yes. Sorta. These days, the WMI folks more or less work for the same Admin Frameworks product team that owns PowerShell, WinRM, and a

Weekly Shell: Managing Processes on Remote Windows NT Systems Can you use Windows PowerShell to, say, list and kill processes on a remote Windows NT 4.0 system? The quick and easy answer is "no." PowerShell doesn't install on NT, doesn't run on NT, and v1 has no remoting which can natively connect to NT. And, by the way, what

Fun WMI Trick Proves You Should Read the Help Did you ever read the help for Windows PowerShell's Get-WmiObject cmdlet? I mean really read the help?You've probably noticed the -computerName parameter, but pay close attention to how it's listed in the help:[-computerName string[]]The outer [square brackets] indicate that the parameter is optional, but the string[] indicates that the parameter