database-tools

Showing Warning State in Taskbar Button

When your script needs attention, i.e. asking for user input, let’s turn its taskbar button in the Windows taskbar orange so the user immediately...

Showing Error State in Taskbar Button

When your script runs into an error, wouldn’t it be nice if the error state could be visually communicated via taskbar button? If the taskbar button...

Showing Progress in Taskbar Buttons

If you run your PowerShell scripts on Windows, you can use the taskbar button as a progress indicator. All you need is install this module:...

Careful with Arrays

Careful with Arrays With PowerShell you never know whether a cmdlet returns an array or a single object. That’s because PowerShell automatically...

Loading PFX Certificate Unattendedly

PowerShell comes with a cmdlet named Get-PfxCertificate that you can use to load a certificate plus private key into memory. However, if the...

Get Volume IDs (Part 2)

In Windows 10 and better, you can use Get-Volume to get volume IDs and other information about your drives: PS> Get-Volume DriveLetter...

Get Volume IDs (Part 1)

You can query WMI to get a list of your drives volume IDs like so: Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Volume | Select-Object -Property DriveLetter,...

Asking for Masked Input (Part 2)

Never ever use plain-text input for secrets and passwords – the text entered by the user may be logged and compromised. Always use a masked input....

Asking for Masked Input (Part 1)

Never ever use plain-text input for secrets and passwords – the text entered by the user may be logged and compromised. Always use a masked input....

Finding MSI Product Codes (Part 2)

On Windows 10 and better, finding MSI packages and their product codes no longer requires WMI queries. Instead, you can use Get-Package: Get-Package...

Finding MSI Product Codes (Part 1)

If you need a list of installed MSI packages and their product codes, you can use WMI to query the information. This may take a couple of seconds:...

Accessing Windows Credential Manager

If you need to access credentials (saved passwords) stored by the Windows Credential Manager, the “CredentialManager” module may be helpful for you....

Take Advantage of Your Profile

When PowerShell launches, it automatically looks for a special autostart script. It does not exist by default and is different for each PowerShell...

Beware of -match

The -match operator is frequently used in scripts however not everyone seems to understand how it really works. It can be a really dangerous filter...

Avoid Add-Member (Part 3)

In the previous tip we looked at a number of clever alternatives to avoid Add-Member when creating your own new objects. While using hash tables to...

Avoid Add-Member (Part 2)

In the previous tip we looked at creating simple data objects, and it became evident that instead of using Add-Member, you can cast a hash table to...

Avoid Add-Member (Part 1)

Often the cmdlet Add-Member is used to create simple objects like this: $user = New-Object -TypeName psobject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty...

Important Keyboard Shortcuts

Two of the most important keyboard shortcuts in any PowerShell environment – whether console, ISE, or VSCode – are TAB and CTRL+SPACE. TAB triggers...

1 5 6 7 8 9 159