powertips

Ever wanted to display a dialog box from PowerShell rather than spitting out console text? Then try this function: function Show-MsgBox { param (...

Here’s a simple way of creating an ASCII table through type casting: 32..255 | ForEach-Object { 'Code {0} equals character {1}' -f $_, [Char]$_ }...

Sometimes you may want to know if your function received parameters over the pipeline or direct. Here is a way to find out: function test {...

PowerShell is single-threaded and can only do one thing at a time, but by using background jobs, you can spawn multiple PowerShell instances and...

You can use regular expressions and the –match operator to validate user input. Here’s a loop that keeps asking until the user enters a...

Surprisingly, when you read some values from the Windows Registry, they do not seem to be in a readable format: $key =...

Ever wanted to support the risk mitigation parameters –WhatIf and –Confirm in your functions, too? Here’s a code template that you...

This line will analyze your system event log for disk controller errors: PS> Get-EventLog -LogName System -InstanceId 3221487627 -ea 0 |...

Tired of using the boring default fonts in PowerShell? There are more monospaced fonts on your system. You just need to allow the console to use...

In a previous tip we presented the functions New-RegKey and Set-RegistryValue to you which made creating registry keys and values very easy. Here is...

In a previous tip we introduced the new function New-RegKey that could create one or more registry keys. Here is a function that creates registry...

With this new function, it is simple to create new registry keys (including missing parent keys) in all registry hives. All you need are proper...

Here is a function that lists all the domains in your forest: function Get-Domain{ $Root = [ADSI]"LDAP://RootDSE" try { $oForestConfig =...

To programmatically enter standby mode, you can use native .NET code like this: function Invoke-Standby { Add-Type -AssemblyName...

When you launch a PowerShell script from outside PowerShell, you may want to return an exit code to the caller so that the caller knows if your...

If you want to run a PowerShell script from outside PowerShell, for example from within a batch file, you probably know that you need to prepend...

Windows Server 2008 R2 comes with a PowerShell module called ServerManager which in turn allows you to add additional features to the server....

Did you know that PowerShell can record audio messages? All you need is some text. You can then turn the text into spoken language, convert it to a...

Maybe you are running lengthy tasks at night. Sometimes you may want to place the machine into hibernation once your script is done. Here’s a...

By adding a new system type called System.Speech, you can make PowerShell speak out loudly: Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Speech $synthesizer =...

Windows Server 2008 R2 comes with the GroupPolicy PowerShell module. You might have to install that feature first before you can use it – run...

If you want to know whether your script has currently full Administrator privileges, here is an (admittedly long) one-liner that tells you:...

If you ever feel the need to lock your interactive session via PowerShell, here’s a function that can do this (and also illustrates how to use...

Stop-Computer and Restart-Computer can shutdown and restart a machine, but there are things they cannot do, for example logging off the current...