Powershell

Frequently, you will have PowerShell retrieve data, and then you pick parts of the information and use it in reports. Like here: $serial =...

Ever had the need to store a password in a script? Ever needed to automate a credential dialog? First: storing passwords and other confidential...

If your partner is as geeky as you, he or she may enjoy a private message in hex encoding. Everyone else may at least enjoy the technology used...

WMI is a treasure chest full of information. This line will read local partitions along with their block sizes: Get-WmiObject -Class...

When you export Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to CSV files, Excel by default saves CSV files in ANSI encoding. That's bad because special...

Sometimes it can get confusing which startup scripts run when PowerShell starts. There can be plenty, and they may be different, depending on...

There are many ways to create custom objects. Here's a creative solution that can be useful in many scenarios: create a text-based...

With an increasing number of PowerShell scripts on your hard drive, it can become hard to find the script you are looking for. Here's a helper...

If your display driver supports WMI, then you can change the display brightness using PowerShell - event on remote machines! Here's the...

If you want to check your current display brightness (preferably on notebooks, of course), here's a quick function: function...

Symbolic links work very similar to "regular" link files (*.lnk): they can point to virtually any file or folder and even UNC paths....

To test whether a script is run by an Administrator with full privileges (UAC elevated), here is an unusual approach that illustrates the enormous...

Hard links are file "phantoms" in the NTFS file system. They make one file visible in multiple file system locations (within one volume)....

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...

To add on-demand verbose output to your PowerShell functions, make sure your functions support the common parameters by adding the CmdletBinding...

To easily copy cmdlet results to other applications, simply pipe them to clip.exe. Next, paste the results into whatever application you want:...

Finally, in PowerShell 3.0, Out-GridView can turn into a versatile selection dialog - just add the new parameter -PassThru and watch: $Title =...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

A PowerShell function can return multiple values. To receive them, simply assign the result to multiple variables: function Get-DateTimeInfo { #...

There are plenty of free webservices around, and provided you have direct Internet access (no proxy), you can use New-WebServiceProxy to access...