Powershell

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...

Yesterday we looked at how PowerShell can turn IEEE754 floating point values returned by a sensor into the actual value. This involved reversing the...

PowerShell is extremely versatile and nowadays often used with IoT and sensors as well. Some return values in IEEE754 float format which typically...

In the previous tip we explained how the throw statement can be influenced by $ErrorActionPreference set to “SilentlyContinue”, and that throw will...

Throw is a PowerShell statement that emits an exception to the caller and then exits the code. At least in theory. In the real world, throw might...

Here’s a special service to users with German language skills – and a challenge to adjust the code for everyone else: the code below...

When you view PowerShell scripts in Windows Explorer and have the preview pane open, by default you don’t get a code preview for your script...

If you want to eliminate completely empty array elements (and do not need to focus on empty properties), here are some approaches with fundamentally...

Occasionally you come across lists (arrays) with empty elements. What’s the best way of removing empty elements? Let’s first focus on a...

Let’s assume in an array you want to get rid of all elements that are either empty or null. This is what many would do: PS>...

For reporting and similar use cases, scripts may require the first and last day in a given month. The first day is easy, yet the last day depends on...

Whenever you have a true DateTime (and not a string, for example), you have plenty of powerful ways to format. You can get DateTime objects...

Ever wondered how old your Windows installation is? A one-liner can tell: PS> (Get-CimInstance -Class Win32_OperatingSystem).InstallDate Freitag,...

Are you tired of OneDrive icons polluting your file explorer tree view? If you don’t use OneDrive, then here are two handy functions that hide...

PowerShell 5 and later releases come with a cmdlet to automatically add new Windows features, so if you are running a Windows Server and would like...

XPS is a document format similar to PDF from Microsoft. Although it never really was used in a large scale, it can still be a valuable internal...

BOM (Byte Order Mask) is a characteristic byte sequence used in some Unicode encoded text files. If you receive text files with BOM that need to be...

In the previous tip we pointed you to a great compilation of PowerShell cheat sheets. Let’s now check out how easily PowerShell can download...

Here is a great compilation of popular PowerShell cheat sheets, completely free and ready for download:...

Text files can be stored using different encodings, and to correctly reading them, you must specify the encoding. That’s why most cmdlets...

On Windows 10, when you hold CTRL+SHIFT and then move your mouse wheel, you can easily control the transparency of console window, including the...

Here is a one-liner that retrieves your original Windows product key: (Get-WmiObject -Class...

In the previous tip we explained how PowerShell can send PDF documents to the default PDF printer. This generic approach is OK for simple scenarios...

To automatically print PDF documents, unfortunately you cannot use Out-Printer. Out-Printer can only send pure text documents to a printer. However,...

Windows 10 comes with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature that you can use to run various Linux distributions. Launch a PowerShell with...

[System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier _i="0" _address="0" theme_builder_area="post_content" /][System.Security.Principal.NTAccount _i="1"...

Here is a one-liner that returns the SID for the current user and can be used in logon scripts, for example:...