database-tools

Beginning with Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2, the operating system adds a wealth of new cmdlets for OS management. With these cmdlets, it is almost...

Active Directory organizes its content in classes like "user" or "computer". Each class has a predefined set of attributes, like...

The PowerShell ISE opens IntelliSense menus frequenty and helps you write code. Sometimes, however, IntelliSense does not pop up automatically,...

If you schedule a script as a scheduled task, or call it externally, and want to make sure the PowerShell process really ends, here is a brute force...

When you export objects to CSV--for example to display them in Excel--arrays won't be output correctly. Here is a simple way that converts...

Here is an easy way to get a list of all currently defined variables, their values, and their purpose. #requires -Version 2 Get-Variable |...

Sometimes you might want to run some command multiple times until it runs successfully. Here is a function that shows a way to do this: #requires...

Sometimes a script needs to save information in a persistent way. Maybe you have a list of computers that you'd want to contact, but only some...

WMI is a powerful technique to find out information about local or remote computers, and you may have used Get-WmiObject before to do so (if not,...

Cmdlets contain pure .NET code, so thanks to cmdlets, you do not need to directly touch .NET code. You can, however. Here are a number of sample...

If you want to execute more than one thing at once, there are many ways to implement this in PowerShell. One may be the use of workflows. They were...

PowerShell supports a number of #requires statements. Technically they are comments but PowerShell checks the requirements, and if they are not met,...

If you do output completely different objects, you may lose information. Take a look at this example: #requires -Version 2 $hash = @{ Name =...

Here is a quick way of getting a good excuse - provided you have Internet access: #requires -Version 3 function Get-Excuse { $url =...

If you run at least Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012, you can use Get-NetTcpConnection to find out which network ports are in use, and who is...

The good oldfashioned netstat.exe can tell you the ports that applications listen on. The result is plain-text, though. PowerShell can use regular...

In a previous tip we showed how you can send text to a fresh Notepad instance. Today, you get an enhanced version of Out-Notepad: you can pipe...

Notepad can be used to display text results. Typically, you would need to save text results to file, then have Notepad open that file. There is a...

Here is a very special (and very underdocumented) way to use PowerShell parameters. Have a look at this function: #requires -Version 2 function...

PowerShell is an extremely powerful language and can access web services and web pages. If you combine that with dynamic parameters, you get a...

Let's assume you have a bunch of Word files and would like to know how much pages they contain. Here is a function that takes the path to one...