powertips

To check all installed updates on a Windows box, there is a COM library you can use. Unfortunately, this library isn't very intuitive to use,...

There are two great sources for PowerShell cheat sheets. One is the set of cheat sheets created by powershellmagazine.com which was just updated to...

Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a new feature in PowerShell 4.0. With DSC, you can write simple configuration scripts and apply them to the...

PowerShell functions can mimick all the features found in a true binary cmdlet--but PowerShell functions are plain PowerShell code, so anyone can...

Whether you want to add a new NTFS access rule to a file or turn off inheritance and add new rules, here is a sample script that illustrates the...

Occasionally, text from a text file needs to be read and processed by other commands. Typically, you would use Get-Content to read the text file...

There is an obscure bug in the PowerShell ISE that may dead-lock the debugger. It affects PowerShell version 3.0 and 4.0. Here is a test script:...

Occasionally, it may become necessary to bulk rename object properties to create better reports. For example, if you retrieve process objects, you...

When you send information to Microsoft Excel, it is converted to text using the built-in .NET ToString() method. This method typically does not...

PowerShell objects can easily be opened in Microsoft Excel. Simply export the objects to CSV, then open the CSV file with the associated program...

By default, any object created from JSON uses String as a data type: $json = @" { "Name": "Weltner", "ID" :...

JSON is describing objects, similar to XML--but a lot easier. JSON allows for nested object properties, so you can retrieve information from various...

If you define variables in a function, then these variables live in function scope. To find out what the value of the variable is in the parent...

Windows 8.1 comes with a ton of new cmdlets. One of them can automatically download and install the latest antivirus signatures for Windows...

Occasionally, the only way of automating processes is to send keystrokes or mouse clicks to UI elements. A good and free PowerShell extension is...

WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is a technology that enables you to create windows and dialogs. The advantage of WPF is that the window design...

Of course you can send emails directly via SMTP server using Send-MailMessage. But if you want to prefill an email form in your default MAPI client,...

Your MAPI client is the email client that by default is used with URLs like "mailto:". To find out if there is a MAPI client, and if so,...

In a previous tip we illustrated how you can extract the command from a command line and strip all arguments. Today, you get a function that does...

Sometimes it becomes necessary to extract the command name from a command line. Here is a function that can do this: And this is the code: function...

You may have seen script code that opens a MsgBox dialog box. Today, you get a piece of code that opens a MsgBox and plays a random sound, adding...

In a previous tip you learned how you can use Invoke-WebRequest to get image links from Google Image Search. Invoke-WebRequest can do better,...

Invoke-WebRequest is your friend whenever you want to download information from the Internet. You could, for example, send a search request to...

Each Windows log file has a list of registered event sources. To find out which event sources are registered to which event log, you can directly...

In the PowerShell ISE editor, when you enter a dollar sign, an IntelliSense menu opens and displays all variables that are currently defined. When...

Often, there is a need to log information when a script runs. Instead of writing log information to a text file that you would have to maintain and...

In a previous tip you have seen that cmdlet errors can only be caught by an error handler if the -ErrorAction is set to "Stop". Doing this...

Non-terminating errors are errors that are handled by a cmdlet internally. Most errors that can occur in cmdlets are non-terminating. You cannot...

Occasionally, you may have noticed that cmdlets throw errors although you specified "SilentlyContinue" as -ErrorAction. The -ErrorAction...

Recently, a reader asked how to retrieve all events from all event logs from a local or remote system, and optionally save them to file. Here is a...