Category: Powershell

David Wilson takes us through debugging Powershell code in Visual Studio Code:

Microsoft has a created a great Powershell extension for VS Code that makes it easy to work with Powershell files. Once the plugin is installed you get intellisense, syntax highlighting, and even visual debugging for files that have a Powershell extension. This debugger can be easily started by pressing F5 when you’re in a Powershell script. Stopping execution on a particular line is as easy as setting a breakpoint by clicking next to a line number.

If you’re coming at debugging from Visual Studio, the VS Code is a little more complicated than what’s in Visual Studio, at least in terms of things to set up first. Once you’ve tried it out a couple of times, though, it’s a pretty convenient experience.

Jana Sattainathan has us hold our horses:

You might want to read this to the end! You are into PowerShell and have a ton of scripts. The problem is some of them run things that are not meant to be run at any time by anyone except you when you first set it up  – like dropping the entire contents of a folder and sub-folders to reinitialize.

Once you realize that you accidentally hit F5 on your “DropFolderContents.ps1” script, it is already too late. The damage is done.

Click through for several techniques to prevent this.

Jeffrey Hicks does some marketing:

It is easy to search the PowerShell Gallery online and from a PowerShell prompt. But I felt there could be more. To address this “marketing” need, I’ve started PSGallery Report.

This is not a PowerShell module. I have set up a process to generate daily reports on what has recently been published in the PowerShell Gallery. I’m generating a set of reports in markdown and posting them to Github.

This is an interesting idea, though you might need to browse to yesterday’s version of the code (if you’re reading this today, 2022-04-11) because the latest run appears to have removed everything.

Ben Miller avoids SQLPS:

In researching some things for a presentation, I was to give at Intersections, Spring 2022, I came across this documentation page for SQL Server PowerShell that in the SQL Server Agent section it indicates that there is a way to get the Agent Job Step to skip loading the SQLPS module and you get to use PowerShell natively and can load whichever modules you would like.

What? Huge News!

That is good news. SQLPS is so outdated it’s not even funny, so this gives you a much better alternative.

Robert Cain has a bunch of posts:

Since September 2020 I’ve been posting extensively about PowerShell in a series I’ve titled Fun With PowerShell. In my next post I will begin a series on a new topic, but before I do I wanted to leave with a Fun With PowerShell Roundup” post.

Below you will find a listing of all posts in my Fun With PowerShell series. Note there are other posts I’ve done in this time frame, but since they did not focus on PowerShell I’ve omitted them from this listing.

Click through for a lengthy and good series.

Chad Baldwin doesn’t need no fancy GUIs:

Let’s talk about how to make something that’s already super exciting, even more fun, by using PowerShell. Why bother with fancy GUI’s and polished tools when you can do it the fun way?

Yes, there’s lots of good options now when it comes to logging, like structured logs, AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, ELK, etc. Tools that give you a lot of power when it comes to filtering, alerts, and monitoring. However, I still often find myself digging through good ol’ *.log files on a server.

Read on for some good information about how to analyze a log file using nothing more than Powershell.