As I'm sure most of my blog readers are aware, I competed in the advanced track of the Scripting Games this year and ended up doing quite well. Two first place finishes and three second places finishes with the official judges and four first place crowd score finishes. I also ended up being the overall winner of the …

Read More

During the 2013 Scripting Games, I won three subscriptions, each good for six months of video training at Interface Technical Training. I have a subscription already so I asked Don Jones about re-gifting my prizes since I don't need more than one subscription so here's your chance to win one. The first video training …

Read More

For me, the Scripting Games have been a great learning experience this year. I've used many PowerShell features that I hadn't used before such as splatting, ADSI, Workflows, and producing html webpages with PowerShell. I plan to write detailed followup blog articles on each of these topics over the next few months. …

Read More

For this event I created multiple functions and I'm going to quote chapter 6, section 1 of the Learn PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches book written by Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks, published by Manning: A function should do one and only one of these things: Retrieve data from someplace Process data Output data …

Read More

I’m seeing a trend with a lot of PowerShell scripters. Many of us have a GUI, non-scripting background and we moved to PowerShell because we didn't want to be button monkeys clicking through the same options in the GUI day in and day out. I've always heard, if you’re going to do something more than once, do it (script …

Read More

The majority of the entries I've seen for the Scripting Games event 2 are using the TotalPhysicalMemory property from the Win32_ComputerSystem WMI class to determine the total amount of physical memory in a server. The property name is TotalPhysicalMemory after all so that's what it should contain, right? Not so fast, …

Read More

Here's my approach to the 2013 PowerShell Scripting Games Advanced Event 2: When I start one of the Scripting Games events, I read and re-read the scenario because if you don't understand the requirements, you can't write an effect script, function, command, tool, etc. It's not a bad idea to print out the event …

Read More

This is a continuation from my previous blog titled 2013 PowerShell Scripting Games Advanced Event 1 – Parameters Don’t Always Work As Expected. This isn't the exact script, but sections of it. You'll notice at the bottom of the first image shown below, I retrieve the list of folder names from the files variable to …

Read More

The scenario for this event states the following which has been paraphrased: Someone allowed log files to build up for around two years and they're starting to causing disk space issues on the server. You need to build a tool to archive the log files because this has happened more than once. Applications write log …

Read More

Last week I posted a PowerShell function to determine what Active Directory domain controllers held the FSMO roles for one or more domains and forests. That particular function used the Get-ADDomain and Get-ADForest cmdlets which are part of the Active Directory PowerShell module. As it so happens, a friend of mine, …

Read More