PowerShell can easily read and write to the Registry, the central store for Windows settings. Here's a function that can turn the display of...
Showing Hidden Files in File Explorer
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Verbose Output for PowerShell Functions
To add on-demand verbose output to your PowerShell functions, make sure your functions support the common parameters by adding the CmdletBinding...
Copying Results to Clipboard
To easily copy cmdlet results to other applications, simply pipe them to clip.exe. Next, paste the results into whatever application you want:...
Turn Out-GridView into Selection Dialog
Finally, in PowerShell 3.0, Out-GridView can turn into a versatile selection dialog - just add the new parameter -PassThru and watch: $Title =...
Three Most Useful ISE Tricks
If you use PowerShell 3.0 and the ISE editor, then here are the three most useful tricks you should know: 1. Press CTRL+J to open a list of...
Vertical Grid View
You can always pipe objects to Out-GridView and get a nice extra window with all of the object properties lined up as table. That's useful if...
Go to Function Definition on F12
If you are into writing long and complex PowerShell code with a lot of functions, then this one is for you. In other development environments, when...
Adding New Type Accelerators in Powershell
If you find yourself using certain .NET types frequently, you may want to make your life easier and implement shortcuts. For example, there is a...
Finding Type Accelerators
PowerShell maintains a list of shortcuts for .NET types to make coding more convenient for you. For example, to convert a string to a DateTime type,...
Returning Multiple Values
A PowerShell function can return multiple values. To receive them, simply assign the result to multiple variables: function Get-DateTimeInfo { #...
Manipulating File System Paths (Part 3)
In previous tips we illustrated how you can turn file system paths into arrays and then create new paths by changing or excluding parts of the...
Manipulating File System Paths (Part 2)
When you turn a path into an array to manipulate parts of the path, if you access path elements by fixed index numbers, then this approach will only...
Manipulating File System Paths
PowerShell lets you access multiple array elements. With the help of -split and -join, you can easily manipulate file system paths this way. To...
Writing DWORD-Values to Registry
In PowerShell 2.0, Set-ItemProperty by default always creates REG_SZ (String) values. PowerShell 3.0 is smarter. When you submit a numeric value,...
Importing Website Tables into Excel
Sometimes, you might see interesting information on websites. For example, navigating to http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html will open a...
Negating Variables
Let's assume you have a variable with a negative value, and you'd like to make it a positive value. Here's a simple way: Basically, this...
Determining Registry Value Data Type
PowerShell can read and write Registry keys and values easily, but there is no a built-in way to check the data type of a given value. To find out...
Creating Colorized Excel Output (Part 2)
In a previous tip, we illustrated how you can feed HTML data to Excel in order to create formatted Excel sheets. Today, we'll show you an easy...
Creating Readable CSV-and HTML-Output
When you convert PowerShell results to CSV or HTML output, you may have discovered that some properties don't display correctly. PowerShell...
Creating Colorized Excel Output
PowerShell can send data to Excel using CSV files easily. Here's a short script creating a list of running services and opening it in Excel...
Finding Unused Drive Letter
Here's a simple way of finding unassigned drive letters: If you just want any unused drive letter, pipe the result to Get-Random. This approach...
Using Bitwise Shift Operators
PowerShell 3.0 introduces two new operators to bitwise shift. You can use these, for example, to convert GB to MB or KB to GB: -shr 10 basically...
Preventing Debugging (Part 2)
In a previous tip we explained how you can tell PowerShell not to debug certain functions by adding a special attribute: function test {...
Adding Suggestions to PowerShell Console
Suggestions are little pieces of text that can appear next to a PowerShell error message to better explain what went wrong. Suggestions only work in...