PowerShell 5 brought class based DSC Resources, which majorly simplifies the process of writing custom DSC resources. During my time working on some custom resources, I developed some tips a long the way which should save you some time and pain during your DSC journey. The tips cover: Structuring …
By the time you are using PowerShell to automate an increasing amount of your system administration, database maintenance, or application-lifecycle work, you will likely come to the realization that PowerShell is indeed a first-class programming language and, as such, you need to treat it as such. …
Long has it been known how to easily document your PowerShell source code simply by embedding properly formatted documentation comments right along side your code, making maintenance relatively painless… But if you advanced to writing your PowerShell cmdlets in C#, you have largely been on …
After authoring last month scripting games puzzle, which involved some scripting around the Unicode standard, I decided to have some fun and write a PowerShell module which interacts directly with the online Unicode Database (UCD) to retrieve the main properties of characters. Using this module you …
There is a lot of documentation out there for interacting with Microsoft Office including Outlook, Excel, Word, etc with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). A lot of time you may only be able to find VBA examples. VBA’s require template files to be sent to the desktop and are a real hassle …
If you are not on Office 365 or have a tenant set up with Microsoft yet, now is the time to reserve your tenant name! With utilizing Office 365, a lot of administration is only available from a PowerShell session. There is a mix of outdated information on what you actually need to install and …
ChatOps is a term used to describe bringing development or operations work that is already happening in the background into a common chat room. It involves having everyone in the team in a single chat room, then bringing tools into the room so everyone can automate, collaborate and see how …
Creating windows shortcuts are usually done through the New Shortcut Wizard, MSI files, Group Policy Objects, or even a simple file copy. Shortcut files are .lnk files that Microsoft Windows uses for shortcuts to local files while .url is used for destinations such as web sites. As we all are aware, …
When you are wanting to run code remotely, it’s common to do this via the use of Invoke-Command (though other options exist, such as through Start-Job for example). The biggest downfall to date i’ve found with remoting is the lack of an option to combine the use of your local functions …
Thanks to all those who participated in the PowerShell Editor Services Hack Week last week! Much progress was made on fixing bugs and adding new features to both PowerShell Editor Services and the PowerShell extension for Visual Studio Code. Here’s a quick summary of the contributions that …
