A few days ago, I saw a tweet about someone needing to extract a zip file with PowerShell and wanting to accomplish the task without loading any third party extensions so I thought I would write a function to accomplish the task. I start out by declaring the function followed by its name, it includes comment based help …

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Let's start out by taking a look at what the PowerShell built-in help says about the ValidatePattern and ValidateScript validation attributes: Here's what that help topic says about ValidatePattern: We'll test using ValidatePattern with an example that I used in my entry for advanced event #4 in the Script Games this …

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You want to determine what VHD's exist for the virtual machines (VM's) that are virtualized on your Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V virtualization host. This may sound simple, but what if you have a base image or template that has been configured and then multiple VM's have been created using differencing …

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My entry for the Scripting Games advanced event 4 contained four separate functions: I want to create a module that contains these functions. There are several different types of modules, but what I'll be creating is a "Script Module". Modules sound like something really complicated, but script modules are …

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Thanks to a tweet from Mark Schill, I discovered that Get-Process now has an IncludeUserName parameter in PowerShell version 4: This means no more having to use WMI to determine what processes are being run by which users: For those of us who work in a terminal services environment, this is a really big deal. I do find …

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In PowerShell version 4, there’s a new RunAsAdministrator option for the Requires statement that prevents a script from executing unless PowerShell is running as an administrator. The information about this new option from the PowerShell version 4 about_Requires help topic is shown in the following image. To learn more …

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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 …

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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 …

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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. …

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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 …

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