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To send mails via PowerShell, you can use Send-MailMessage. However, this requires that you have access to an SMTP server, and mails sent this way...

The human mind can read sentences even if the characters are scrambled as long as the first and last letter of each word stays intact. Here is a...

PowerShell scripts can grow very slow when you (a) need to process a lot of items and (b) you are using the PowerShell pipeline. Let’s today...

Where-Object is one of the most frequently used PowerShell commands, yet it looks unfamiliar to new PowerShell users. Those who are familiar with...

When you define mandatory parameters in PowerShell, the user gets prompted for the value if it is missing. The prompt uses the parameter name only...

Not all PowerShell cmdlets ship with PowerShell. Many are part of 3rd party modules which in turn ship when you install certain software, or use...

Not all PowerShell cmdlets ship with PowerShell. Many are part of 3rd party modules which in turn ship when you install certain software, or use...

Not all PowerShell cmdlets ship with PowerShell. Many cmdlets are part of 3rd party modules which in turn ship when you install certain software, or...

In the previous tip we showed you how you can take any image or photo and turn it into a black&white ASCII art. Today, we have a revised...

With PowerShell entering the IoT world, sometimes it is necessary to deal with binary sensor data and ancient checksum models to verify data...

Occasionally it is necessary to invert the bits for a number. Most often, this is part of custom algorithms or checksum calculations. It raises the...

Numbers are stored internally as bytes. An Int32 value, for example, uses four bytes. Sometimes it is required to split up the number into its byte...

In the previous tip, we introduced a function that generates nicely centered headers and accepted a single string. Here is the function and its...

Reporting and writing log files is a common task in PowerShell. Here is a simple function to create nicely centered headers. Adjust $width to the...

Here is a simple one-liner that returns your computers’ current IP address and its full DNS name: PS>...

Slmgr.vbs is an ancient VBScript used to automate Windows license management. In the previous tip we started bypassing slmgr.vbs by reading the WMI...

Most Windows license and activation tasks can be automated using an ancient VBScript called slmgr.vbs. It does not make much sense to use this tool...

Most automated license key management tasks are done via a command called slmgr. This command is actually an ancient VBScript. To read all of your...

Let’s start this mini-series with a one-liner that extracts your Windows license key: PS> $key = (Get-WmiObject -Class...

It’s amazing how versatile PowerShell is: with just a couple of lines of code, you can turn any photo and image into a piece of ASCII art....

In the previous tip, we asked Active Directory to validate user account passwords. The same can be done with local accounts. Your PowerShell code...

PowerShell can easily verify a password against a domain account. In other words, you can bind script logic to passwords maintained in Active...

Whenever you start or stop a service, it may take some time for the service to actually adopt the desired state – or it can of course fail....

WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)is not just a technique to create UIs. You can create any type of vector-based graphics composition and save it...