I admit to an almost perverse fondness for command line environments. So I decided to jump onto PowerShell as my default command line environment because its way more cool than the cmd shell and even a nerd with a penchant for undead languages sometimes worries about being cool to some tin...

I had a bit of an obscure need recently at work to create a named pipe. This is usually a developer thing to do, but in order to perform some testing in our lab, we needed to produce systems that matched a certain criteria, and one of those was to have a named pipe with a certain name. Turns out tha...

Background: In an earlier post I talked about some new features for Windows 2008 and Vista.  One of those new features that is often overlooked are the data collector sets (DCS).  One particular role that leverages data collector sets is active directory.  Active directory has put “...

I’ve finally finished the first public release of PoshWpf, and was getting ready to ship it as part of a new release of my PowerBoots module. The idea is that I need PoshWpf itself to be a stand-alone module so that it can be used in production with PowerShell 1.0, until such time as PowerShel...

Marco Shaw asked recently on the PowerShell MVP mailing list if it would be possible to open a tab in the PowerShell V2 ISE (the GUI console which ships with CTP3) that would connect to a remote machine.  Turns out that it’s not that hard at all.  Ibrahim on the PowerShell team gave an a...

At last week’s UK PowerShell User Group meeting, Jeremy gave a talk on Error handling. It got me thinking about the whole business of errors and error handling in PowerShell. One of the great differences between casual and production scripts is the need to manage, control and handle errors. If I w...

  For homo sapiens, getting older is painful. Take me for example. Nine hours on a plane never bothered me when I was in my 20s with a rubber backbone. But a couple of weeks out from birthday # 43 and one cross-country airplane ride translates into a sudden spinal meltdown that has me lying in ...

Script blocks are a powershell construct for storing an expression or group of statements inside an expression.  It’s the equivalent of a C#/F#/VB Lamba expression.  Recently I needed to use a script block but found I had forgotten how to read passed parameters inside the script block.&#...

Introduction As PowerShell has evolved, there are a number of things that have been needed to be added in order to make it truly enterprise ready. One of the key concepts added into Version 2 of PowerShell is that of a module. A module is some chunk of code that you can import into PowerShell and th...

Today is Christmas day and I’m away from the computer, enjoying Christmas dinner with my wife and daughter – I’m off the grid! As is our tradition, we’ll start with a nice bottle of Champagne and some smoked salmon. Then a bottle of Opus 1, with some cold roast duck, along with roasted turke...