powertips

In a previous tip you learned how decorating function parameters with a ValidateSet attribute would allow the ISE editor to display intelliSense...

To take advantage of the new PowerShell 3.0 argument completion, make sure you're adding ValidateSet attribute to your function parameters...

In PowerShell 3.0, while you still can use the powerful Get-WmiObject cmdlet, it is slowly becoming replaced by the family of CIM cmdlets. If you...

In times where cmdlets can originate from all kinds of modules, it sometimes becomes important to find out which cmdlets are truly built into...

To get rich IntelliSense in PowerShell ISE 3.0, you should start adding the OutputType attribute to your functions. If you do, then ISE is able to...

Here is a simple line that tells you whether PowerShell runs in MTA- or STA-mode: [Runspace]::DefaultRunspace.ApartmentState -eq 'STA' This...

There are various ways to determine the IP address that is assigned to your machine. Here is a rather unusual approach that uses text operators to...

Sometimes, you know the information you are after is present in some object property, but there are so many properties that it is a hassle to search...

When you save Excel spreadsheets to a CSV file, special characters get lost. That's because Excel is saving the CSV file using very simple ANSI...

If you have a CSV file and would like to change the order of columns, simply import it into PowerShell, use Select-Object to change the order, and...

To find open files on a remote system, use openfiles.exe and convert the results to rich objects. Here is a sample (replace "storage1"...

If you want to create your own custom objects, for example, to enable your functions to return rich objects, you can always use Select-Object like...

There are four new operators in PowerShell v3: -shl: shifts bits to the left -shr: shifts bits to right and preserves sign for signed values -in:...

In PowerShell v2, function parameters could be decorated with validation attributes. In PowerShell v3, these attributes can now also be applied to...

In PowerShell v3 language syntax, it is finally allowed to have line breaks after "." and "::". These symbols are used to access...

Here is a piece of code that illustrates some of the challenges when writing remotable code: function Get-Log($LogName='System',...

If you want to send a script block to a remote computer, it is important to understand that the script block is evaluated on the remote computer. So...

Enabling PowerShell Remoting is a simple thing: open an elevated PowerShell console and type: PS> Enable-PSRemoting -Force There are two types of...

In PowerShell, the variable "$_" has special importance. It works like a placeholder in scenarios like this one: PS> Get-ChildItem...

If a console application or script has changed the console colors and you want to reset them to the default colors defined in your console...

Script blocks are dynamic by default, so variables in a script block will be evaluated each time the script block runs. By turning a script block in...

There are plenty of useful console commands such as ipconfig, whoami, and systeminfo. Most of these commands hide inside the Windows folder....

In a previous tip we explained how you can use slmgr, a built-in VBScript, to check Windows licensing state. The core information used by this...

Sometimes it isn't easy to call a command-line tool with some arguments. The PowerShell parser may interfere, and your call may even return...

To automatically manage Windows license keys, use slmgr which is a VBScript that you can call from PowerShell. Just make sure that cscript.exe is...

Unfortunately, there is no built-in cmdlet to unzip files. There are plenty of 3rd party tools, many of which are free. If you cannot use these...

PowerShell v3 comes with a hugely useful new cmdlet called Invoke-WebRequest. You can use it to interact with websites which also includes...

In PowerShell v2, if command names started with a number, you had to use the call operator "&": PS> & 7z In PowerShell v3, this...

In some of our previous tips, we showed how you can turn comma-separated data returned from different console tools into rich PowerShell objects....

If you want to permanently delete a digital certificate in your certificate store, here is how. This line lists all your personal certificates:...