TechTalk Interview Posted

If you missed the TechTalk radio interview (but wanted to hear it,) I’ve uploaded it here: http://www.leeholmes.com/projects/techtalk/techtalk_12-10-2006.mp3. Thanks, Tom, for an interesting interview!

Getting Started with PowerShell

One of the more common questions we get from people interested in PowerShell is “how do I get started?” They see examples of PowerShell weilding its considerable strength, and are often intimidated by a perceived learning curve. It doesn’t have to be that way, though — PowerShell is easy to start playing with, and easy to continue learning. First of all, you’ll want to download PowerShell. If you visit http://www.microsoft.com/PowerShell, you’ll get to the PowerShell homepage that lists an enormous number of resources.

Add Custom Methods and Properties to Types in PowerShell

To give a glimpse into the writing process behind my upcoming “Windows PowerShell - The Definitive Guide” (O’Reilly,) I’ll occasionally post entries “as the author sees it.” This entry discusses PowerShell’s type extension files. Add Custom Methods and Properties to Types Problem You want to add your own custom properties or methods to all objects of a certain type.¶ Solution Use custom type extension files to add custom members to all objects of a type.

PowerShell Prompt Here PowerToy

Today, we have a guest post from Michael Murgolo. He’s developed a PowerShell Prompt Here powertoy (like the one we all know and love,) but this one doesn’t suffer from the uninstall bug that the current CMD Prompt Here powertoy (or its derivatives) do. And the explanation is awesome, to boot. An Old PowerToy is New Again by Michael Murgolo PowerShell PowerToys Download One of the most popular Windows PowerToys is the venerable Command (or CMD) Prompt Here.

Download the Official Windows PowerShell 1.0 Release!

A few minutes ago, Bob Muglia and Jeffrey Snover at IT Forum announced something at we’ve long been waiting for – the official Release to Web (RTW) of Windows PowerShell v1.0! In late December of 2002, PowerShell entered the public eye when a Slashdot reader stumbled upon a job posting for “Microsoft’s Next Generation Shell”. About a year later, we officially announced the project (code-named “Monad”) at the 2003 Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference.

A New Virtual Earth Mashup in Born

About 8 months ago, I wrote a Virtual Earth mashup to display commute times to Microsoft in and around the Seattle area. It’s been very successful, and solves a big problem for many people looking to buy a house (amongst other things.) http://www.leeholmes.com/projects/commute About 3 or 4 months after posting the mashup, the Virtual Earth team changed a bunch of the APIs, which pretty much broke every existing mashup – including mine.

Writing PowerShell Cmdlets vs. Writing PowerShell Providers

A question that sometimes comes up is, “When do I write a PowerShell provider instead of a cmdlet?” To explain that, it is useful to understand how PowerShell distills management concepts for administrators. In the pre-PowerShell world, the command-line management experience is fairly fractured. You have a huge number of awkwardly named commands, with no way to quickly determine what they mean. Many of them perform nearly identical actions, but have very different names.

Load a Custom DLL from PowerShell

One of the amazing features of PowerShell is its amazing reach. You can interact with the file system, the registry, certificate stores, COM, WMI, XML, cmdlets, providers … the list seems to go on forever. One important extension point is the ability to seamlessly interact with .NET DLLs. These are most commonly shipped in SDKs, and many people have made use of this. For example: Sharepoint: http://blogs.flexnetconsult.co.uk/colinbyrne/PermaLink,guid,1665700b-e0de-4b8a-bb1c-014d6fbcf2db.aspx Team Foundation Server: http://netcave.

Email Quoting and Wrapping in 59 Bytes

Here’s a useful bit of line noise that I came up with when I wanted to put some quoted text into email. Starting with unwrapped text in the clipboard: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Get-HelpMatch - Search Help (Apropos) in PowerShell

To give a glimpse into the writing process behind my upcoming “Windows PowerShell - The Definitive Guide” (O’Reilly,) I’ll occasionally post entries “as the author sees it.” The first in this series shows how to search the PowerShell help content for a phrase or pattern. Program: Get-HelpMatch¶ Both the Get-Command and Get-Help cmdlets allow you to search for command names that match a given pattern. However, when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, you will more often have success searching through the help content for an answer.