powertips

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...

Using background jobs to run tasks concurrently often is not very efficient as you might have seen in a previous tip. Background job performance...

If a script needs some speed-up, you might find background jobs helpful. They can be used if a script does a number of things that also could run...

Internally, Active Directory uses ticks (100 nanosecond units since 1601) to represent date and time. It has been hard in the past to convert these...

If you'd like to monitor how long a script takes to run, you could use Measure-Command, but this cmdlet is for diagnostic purposes only and...

When you save Microsoft Excel data as CSV, unfortunately the encoding does not match the default encoding used by Import-Csv. So when you import the...

You can use Get-Content to read in any plain text file. However, Get-Content will return the file content line by line, and you get back a string...