Announcing the General Availability of IDERA SQL Compliance Manager 7.0

Thanks to Shay Levy from http://powershellmagazine.com for showing how to do this: here's a small function that returns the architecture an executable was compiled for: function Get-FileArchitecture { param ( $filePath = "$env:windir\notepad.exe" )...

Often, you may need a list of strings and want to store it in a variable. The common coding practice is like this: $MachineType = 'Native','I386','Itanium','x64' A much easier approach does not require quotes or commas. It simply...

With Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod, PowerShell 3.0 now has powerful support for downloading information from the Internet as well as communicating with Internet services. We have had a number of tips on these in the past. Some people use Invoke-WebRequest to...

Did you know that you can use the Help Window that comes with PowerShell 3.0 and display your own text information inside of it? What's even better: the help window will support full text searches in the text you display and highlight any matching text, just like...

If you find yourself submitting the same value for a cmdlet parameter over and over again, then PowerShell 3.0 lets you set a default value. Once you defined a default value for a parameter, you no longer need to specify it. This can be very convenient in production...

One common headache are non-matching braces or parentheses in PowerShell scripts. So when you write a script, it is recommended to align matching braces and parentheses and make your code more readable this way. In addition, PowerShell 3.0 ISE editor helps identify...

In a previous tip we illustrated that ISE code snippets (press CTRL+J to view them) are plain ps1xml-files that you can manage in File Explorer. By default, the PowerShell 3.0 ISE editor loads snippets from your private cache folder. Imagine you and your colleagues...

By default, the PowerShell 3.0 ISE editor loads code snippets automatically, and you can then select and insert any of these by pressing CTRL+J. Custom code snippets are stored in a special folder that you can open like this: $snippetPath = Join-Path (Split-Path...

The PowerShell 3.0 ISE editor ships with a number of default code snippets that you can see (and insert) by pressing CTRL+J. Once you start to refine your snippets and create your own (New-IseSnippet), you may want to hide the default snippets. This line will remove...

In a previous tip, we showed how you can use New-IseSnippet to add new code snippets to the ISE editor in PowerShell 3.0. These custom snippets stay permanently because PowerShell creates XML files for them. You can view these files with Get-IseSnippet: Get-IseSnippet...

The new PowerShell 3.0 ISE editor features a snippet menu that lets you easily insert predefined code snippets. Simply press CTRL+J to open the menu, select the snippet, and insert it into your code. To add more snippets, here is the way to go: $myCodeSnippet=@'...

Whenever you need to assign multi-line text to a variable, you can use so-called here-string. This is a sample: $myCodeSnippet=@' function Verb-Noun { param() } '@ Anything in between the quotes is untouched by the PowerShell parser and can contain any...

PowerShell 3.0 ISE editor creates collapsible regions automatically, so you can collapse a function body or an IF statement. In addition, you can add your own custom collapsible regions like this: #region Get-Process #endregion Make sure you type the region comment...

Sometimes you may just be interested in the last couple of entries in a log file. Here’s a simple yet fast way of outputting only the last x lines from a text log: # Show last 5 lines of windowsupdate.log file $logs = Get-Content -Path $env:windir\windowsupdate.log...

In a previous tip we illustrated how you can use web services to retrieve information such as public holidays or the location of an IP address. Often, you can get the very same information by contacting websites that provide XML results. Once you know such sites, you...

Whenever a machine is connected to the Internet, it gets a public IP address (typically assigned by the ISP), and this public IP address is not identical to your machine's IP address. In PowerShell 3.0, there is a new and extremely useful cmdlet called...

In PowerShell 3.0, WPF is a great (and easy) way of creating GUIs. If you have a touch-enabled machine, check out how easily you can open a drawing window from PowerShell: Add-Type -AssemblyName PresentationFramework Add-Type -AssemblyName PresentationCore Add-Type...

Whenever you change a file, the file system automatically updates the LastWriteTime property. If you'd like to change a file without leaving such traces, try this: # make sure this file and folder exist!! $path = 'c:\temp\somefile.txt' $file = Get-Item...

Ed Wilson from the Scripting Guys demonstrated how PowerShell can use free web services to find out holidays. You do need direct (non-proxy) Internet access for this to work. This is how you connect to the holiday web service: $URI =...

Aliases are shortcuts for commands and useful in interactive PowerShell. Once you write scripts, however, you should no longer use aliases and instead use the underlying commands directly. You can always use Get-Command to find out the underlying command for an alias:...