Every year, two of the biggest hacking / security conferences take place in Las Vegas: Black Hat, and DefCon. Both are great experiences, and both have a common theme – hackers (“Intelligent folks that like to make machines do things they weren’t originally designed for”) getting together to educate each other and have fun. Unsurprisingly, one of the places that people get together to have fun is the free open WiFi.

You might sometimes run into a situation where you’ve got a serialized object stream, and want to redact sensitive information out of that stream. For example, consider the following object: $objectToSerialize = [PSCustomObject] @{ Name = "Lee" SocialSecurityNumber = "SomeSecretNumber" Address = "1234 Something Road" GateCode = [PSCustomObject] @{ Prefix = 1234 Password = "SomeSecretPassword" } } In this, you want to remove any property value that says “SomeSecret”. PowerShell makes this fairly easy, since the PSObject special property on every type gives you access to an object’s methods and properties.

If you’ve seen the OutputType attribute when writing a cmdlet or advanced function, you might wonder what we use it for. The goal of the OutputType attribute is to provide a mechanism for tools to know what your cmdlets may output without running them. If they know that without running it, they can provide useful services – such as tab completion, data flow analysis, etc. For example: Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.

Troy Hunt recently posted a great discussion about the dangers of letting your devices automatically connect to insecure wireless networks – especially if those have a common name like ‘Starbucks’ or ‘Apple Demo’. All devices let you “forget” a network when you are in range, and Windows 7 (and before) even had an interface that let you delete networks when they were out of range. This dialog was removed in Windows 8, although the ‘netsh’ command still lets you accomplish it from the command line.

We frequently get questions asking if the PowerShell ISE supports a feature that it doesn’t. For example, variable watch windows, function browsers, or “find all matches in the current document”. Or as another example, many of you are very familiar with Visual Studio and naturally wish for Visual Studio feature . That is usually different for each person :) The Visual Studio team is many times larger than the PowerShell team, and they’ve had a 15-year head start.

A Facebook friend recently posted a cool picture from the Pi chain that California Institute of Technology created on Pi Day, 2013: After seeing that, you might wonder – “Where in Pi is that?” And, “What number does each colour represent?” PowerShell can help here – its support for regular expressions let you find all kinds of stuff in text. But where do you find the text of Pi? Bing, of course.

Following up on my previous post about the ScanSnap ix500, one thing I couldn’t find when searching for information about it was how well it did scanning information into Excel. So, here’s a quick video that demonstrates it:

If you’ve ever played with the Getting Things Done system, you may have heard David Allen’s excited advice for getting your paperwork organized: a filing system, and automatic labeler. One of the hardest parts of a paperwork filing system is the nomenclature. If you just have files that are labeled “A-Z”, you can never remember – did you put your car insurance information under “C” for Car? “I” for insurance? “G” for Geico?

Updated 7/13/2021 to cover the 4th Edition Over the past 8 years, O’Reilly and I have embarked on an experiment to expand the boundaries of traditional publishing even further – full, online, searchable access to the PowerShell Cookbook. With the release of the 4th edition of the PowerShell Cookbook, I am pleased to announce that we will be continuing with this very exciting approach! There’s been a huge shift in the way that people like to get their content in the past few years.

On Friday, Amazon began shipping the PowerShell Cookbook, V3! You can buy it in both print and digital formats from Amazon, O’Reilly, and any of your other favourite book sellers. If you or your company subscribes to Safari, it’s there too. It’s almost 1100 pages now, despite my continuing efforts to keep it svelte :) Since every edition of the book is about filling “missing pieces” from the last, and we filled tons of “missing pieces” from V2, much of the new content directly replaced recipes that existed in the V3 book.