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Category: Powershell

Setting Default Parameters in Powershell

Published 2021-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks doesn’t have time for parameters:

A quick post today to remind you of a way to make PowerShell even easier to use. PowerShell cmdlets and functions obviously help us get a lot done, and most commands offer a number of parameters to customize what needs to be done. Unless you love typing, you probably would like an even easier way to use PowerShell. Let me show you.

Read on to see how. My one concern here would be if you forget about the parameters, you may end up with unexpected results compared to people without your default parameters. This seems to me a case for using these defaults somewhat sparingly.

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Automated File Cleanup with Powershell

Published 2021-04-05 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Hicks does some spring cleaning:

Springtime is approaching in North America. Where I live, the snow has finally melted and we have blue skies with warmer temperatures. Of course, this means Spring Cleaning. Time to clear out the winter debris and spruce up the house. For me, this is also a good time for some computing housecleaning as well. I don’t know about your Windows environment, but I tend to accumulate a lot of junk. Most of the time I don’t see it, but I know it’s there. While the junk normally doesn’t have a negative impact, I think mentally, I like clearing things out and tidying up. So I pulled out some older PowerShell code, freshened it up, and now I have a set of tools for clearing out junk and temporary folders. Let me show you what I came up with.

Click through for the scripts.

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Using Azure Functions to Tag Resources

Published 2021-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret shows off an interesting way of using Azure Functions to apply tags to resources:

In part one I discussed how useful Azure tags can be, and specifically about how adding a ‘dateCreated’ tag can help you keep track of your resources, and how to find resources with certain tags using PowerShell.  Part 2 and 3 are based around the fact that adding the ‘dateCreated’ tag is a great idea, but relying on a human to remember to add it is less than ideal. In part 2 we looked at using Azure Policy to automatically add the tag. Today’s post will cover another option using Azure Functions.

Azure Functions gives us a way of running serverless code, written in a number of different languages, triggered by specific events or timings.  Looking through the documentation there are many use cases from processing files to analysing IoT workstreams.  Our use case is to run a PowerShell script that tags any resources that are missing the ‘dateCreated’.

Click through to see how.

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Disabling the Powershell Update Nag

Published 2021-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Constantine Kokkinos hides an annoyance:

To be clear – I think you should be updating your PowerShell regularly, however the HUGE WHITE BLOCK ACROSS MY ENTIRE SCREEN EVERY TIME I LAUNCH VISUAL STUDIO CODE ISN’T GREAT.

Hated that caps? Yeah, that’s basically my eyes every time I see this nag window inverting the colors across my ennntiiirrreee screen.

Read on for the one-liner which gets rid of this message.

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Logging Powershell Script Details

Published 2021-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer has logging boilerplate code for us:

So you have already created your first PowrShell scripts? Now you want to enhance this scripts with error logging ? If your answer is yes, jump in this this article. I will show you how to implement a custom function that captures the errors and writes errors in an error log file. Let’s get started.

Click through for the code, as well as an explanation of each bit.

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Building VBA Macros for Excel in Powershell

Published 2021-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Mikey Bronowski has a case of developer inception:

This is part of the How to Excel with PowerShell series. Links to all the tips can be found in this post.
If you would like to learn more about the module with an interactive notebook, check this post out.

In this last post of the series, I am going to mix Excel, PowerShell and VBA. If you weren’t using PowerShell to manage Excel files before, you might have used VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to do so. Excel is a powerful tool and even this area can be improved a little bit with PowerShell.

It’s a shame to see this series wrap up, but Mikey has provided a huge amount of content around automating Excel spreadsheet creation. If you haven’t been reading these, I definitely recommend it.

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Common Power BI Administration Scripts

Published 2021-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Brett Powell continues a series:

Today’s post builds on top of Power BI Admin Scripts Part I by describing five additional PowerShell scripts that Power BI service administrators can utilize to address relatively common scenarios. Like Part I, the five new scripts have been added to my GitHub repository and I’ll only share context in the blog.

Please be sure to read through the prerequisites section of Part I and confirm you have the necessary permissions (e.g. Power BI Admin role) and software installed such as the latest Power BI Management PowerShell modules.

Check it out for five more scripts. Brett also teases a part 3, but you have to wait until after the credits sequence to see it.

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Reading Extended Events Files with Powershell

Published 2021-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Emanuele Meazzo shows how to work with Extended Event *.xel files:

However, I’ve found myself in a tricky spot, as I had multiple instances recording events, and those events had to be analyzed as a whole.
I could have simply written a script to get the data from each instance, querying the system function sys.fn_xe_file_target_read_file and then uploading it somewhere else, but this approach has the issue of adding additional load on the source instances, and I didn’t want to add additional load to the already overworking instances I was trying to monitor.

I then wondered, can I move the files over from the busy servers and read them from another machine? I surely didn’t want to open each file manually and exporting it to a table and/or CSV in order to mash them together, too

Read on to see how.

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Adding Images to Excel using Powershell

Published 2021-03-15 by Kevin Feasel

Mikey Bronowski continues a series on working with Powershell:

This is part of the How to Excel with PowerShell series. Links to all the tips can be found in this post.
If you would like to learn more about the module with an interactive notebook, check this post out.

Spreadsheets’ main purpose is data: storing, manipulating and analyzing them. We can add some colours or charts to make the data more friendly, but sometimes we may want to add something else – like a logo or picture and all that can be achieved with PowerShell.

Read on to see how you can lay out an image or add shapes to a spreadsheet.

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Combining SendTo and Powershell

Published 2021-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Wilkinson shares a script with us:

If you are not familiar, SendTo options are those available when you right click on a file/folder in file explorer and select the Send To option in the menu. When you use this option, the currently selected files/folders are passed to the SendTo shortcut as a space delimited list of files and folders. This is important to know so you better understand what needs to be done to read that list.

I can confirm that this works well for deploying script out, especially when they need to go to multiple servers or multiple databases on servers. That functionality takes a bit more effort to write, but combine Mark’s code with Jess’s and you are well on your way.

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