In PowerShell, there are four separate sources of commands you can pick from when trying to solve a problem. In this mini-series, we look at all of...
powertips
Categories
- Free tools
- SQL Admin Toolset
- SQL Compliance Manager
- SQL Defrag Manager
- SQL Diagnostic Manager for MySQL
- SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
- SQL Diagnostic Manager Pro
- SQL Doctor
- SQL Enterprise Job Manager
- SQL Inventory Manager
- SQL Query Tuner for SQL Server
- SQL Safe Backup
- SQL Secure
- SQL Workload Analysis for SQL Server
- Uptime Infrastructure Monitor Formerly Uptime
Checking Battery Wear and Quality
If you run a laptop you can easily ask WMI for battery status such as charging status. With a little bit more work, though, you can also check the...
Using Enums to Decipher Code IDs
WMI is a great and simple way of gathering information about computers. For example, it’s a snap to determine the type of computer you are on: $info...
Using PowerShell Scripts as Commands (Part 2)
Publishing on Feruary 2, 2023 In our previous tip we discussed a simple way to extend the PowerShell command set. By saving scripts in a folder that...
Using PowerShell Scripts as Commands (Part 1)
One very simple way of extending PowerShell commands are scripts. To turn a script into a command, pick a folder and store the PowerShell script in...
Dumping Edge Cookies
If you’d like to find out (or document) the website cookies stored by the Edge browser, PowerShell can dump that information for you. The cookie...
Investigating PowerShell Command Results
When you run into new PowerShell commands, it’s always a good idea to get familiar with the result objects. When you simply run a PowerShell command...
Querying Advanced Printer Info via SNMP
Many network printer support SNMP to query information about the device, i.e. its serial number, the status and paper sizes of installed trays, or...
Subscribing to Session Lock/Unlock Events
Whenever a user on a Windows box locks his or her session, an event is emitted. Another event is emitted when you unlock your session again. Both...
Custom Action for Unknown Commands
Whenever you enter a command name that cannot be found by PowerShell, it can extend the command search by custom actions that you define. Here is a...
Managing File Shares
The Windows operating system ships with the “Storage” PowerShell module which can be used both from Windows PowerShell and PowerShell 7. One of the...
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 Indeterminate Progress in Taskbar Buttons
Occasionally, you do not know the exact progress of your script but you’d still like to inform the user that your script is “busy”. If you run your...
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:...
Identifying Multi-Language Online Documents (Part 2)
How can you automatically check the supported languages for an online document? Provided the URL uses a language ID, it’s easy to create a list of...
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....
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....
Using HTML to create PDF Reports (Part 3)
HTML can be a simple way of formatting data for output reports. In this last part we illustrate how you convert the final HTML report to PDF...
Using HTML to create PDF Reports (Part 1)
HTML can be a simple way of formatting data for output reports. In this 3-part series, we first illustrate how you compose HTML reports, then show a...
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...