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Category: Powershell

Building a Powershell Script Template

Published 2021-06-07 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin has a template for us:

If at any point an automated script fails for some reason, or does not behave as expected, it would be invaluable to have it produce and retain historical logs that could later be investigated for clues as to what it did, and where and why it failed.

Powershell has a few useful cmdlets for this, capable of writing an Output to any sort of destination, such as a log file. For example, Out-File.

However, in my personal experience, nothing beats the level of verbosity offered by a special cmdlet called Start-Transcript.

Read on for an explanation for each part of the template, and then the template itself.

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Restoring Databases from Blob Storage Files

Published 2021-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

Stuart Moore talks us through a (rare) gap in dbatools:

In the comments here I was asked about using Restore-DbaDatabase when all you have is blobs in an Azure Storage account. This can be done, involves a couple of non dbatools steps.

Restore-DbaDatabase doesn’t natively ‘talk’ Azure, nor do any of the other dbatools commands. The reason for this is that we didn’t want to force dbatools users to have to install the AzureRM/Az powershell modules just to use our module. We’ve gone to a lot of effort to make sure that dbatools is acceptable to Security Admins and that it has a small(ish) footprint, and adding those large modules as prerequisites would have broken that.

Read on for how you can get around that.

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Finding Cmdlets in Powershell

Published 2021-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Vamvas helps us with cmdlet lookup:

Question: I need to interrogate the module for a Powershell cmdlet but I can’t find the actual physical location of the file on the host server.  I can execute the cmd through the Powershell command line OK , but can’t find the powershell cmd file. Is there a Powershell method of locating the Powershell module files?

Click through to see the answer.

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Creating an Azure SQL Database from Powershell

Published 2021-05-26 by Kevin Feasel

Gijs Reijn shows how to automate the process of creating an Azure SQL Database using Powershell:

Before you can create an Azure SQL database, you must create an Azure SQL server to host it on. Assuming you’re already authenticated to Azure:

Open PowerShell on your local computer and create the Azure SQL server that will host the Azure SQL database.

The command below is creating an Azure SQL server called sqlestate in the prerequisite resource group with a SQL admin username of SqlAdministrator and a password of AVeryStrongP@ssword0. The command is saving the output of the New-AzSqlServer cmdlet to use attributes from the server created later.

Read on for the step-by-step breakdown and full script.

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Searching through Stored Procedures using dbatools

Published 2021-05-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret has another way to search through stored procedure text:

When we’re looking for the command we need within dbatools to fulfil our needs I cannot recommend Find-DbaCommand highly enough.  This command will search all other commands for the pattern you pass in.  Today we know we want to find references in stored procedures so let’s see if there is a command that will help.

Seems like querying sys.sql_modules is a little easier, though if this is a step in a pipeline (such as finding old procedures based on some no-longer-appropriate code snippet and deploying new versions), this can be a good first step.

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Understanding the PipelineVariable

Published 2021-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Baldwin shows off the PipelineVariable parameter:

PowerShell has been a daily tool for me for at least 5 or 6 years at this point, so when I learn something new that seems fairly useful I figure it’s probably worth writing about. These posts also help me remember because they force me to do more research into it than I normally would.

TIL (Today I Learned) about the -PipelineVariable parameter in PowerShell, known as a “Common Parameter”; which are automatically added by PowerShell to cmdlets that are decorated with the [cmdletbinding()] attribute.

This is by no means a “new” feature, -PipelineVariable was added as a common parameter in 2017 for version v4.0.

Read on for a clear explanation of how it works and where it can be useful.

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Network Configuration with Powershell

Published 2021-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer shows how to configure network settings on a Windows machine using Powershell:

Today I would like to give a tutorial for a basic network configuration on Windows systems using PowerShell. We start with a fresh installation of a Windows operating system.

Read on for a fairly simple example, one which lays out the foundation for more complicated scenarios such as configuring networking settings for an Availability Group.

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Taskbar Management with Powershell

Published 2021-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks shows how you can use Powershell to manage Windows 10 taskbar settings:

When I’m working on a Pluralsight course, I tend to setup a virtual machine for recording. Although, lately I’ve been trying with Windows 10 Sandbox. This is handy when all I need is a Windows 10 desktop. When I setup the system, I have particular settings I need to configure. Naturally I use a PowerShell script to automate the process. One item that I wanted to address was Windows 10 taskbar. When I’m recording a course, I like to have it auto-hide. Sure, I could manually set it. But that’s no fun.

After a little online research I came across this page. In addition to the manual steps, the author also provided a snippet of PowerShell code! I assumed there would be registry setting I could configure and was hoping to find that. But this was even better. The author’s code was written to be used from a CMD prompt to invoke a few PowerShell commands. But since I’m already using PowerShell for my desktop configuration, I took his code and created re-usable PowerShell functions.

Read on for a lengthy but helpful script.

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Enforcing Powershell Named Parameters

Published 2021-05-24 by Kevin Feasel

Dale Hirt is the law:

Line 3 is a named parameter called $badParam. This becomes important a little later. Lines 4, 5, 6, and 7 are named parameters. Now, how can we enforce that someone uses those named parameters.

Read on for an interesting technique to ensure that your callers are using named parameter rather than positional parameter calls.

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