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Category: Powershell

Adding Help to Your Powershell Code

Published 2023-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain helps those who help themselves:

Having good help is vital to the construction of a module. It explains not only how to use a function, but the purpose of the module and even more.

Naturally I’ve included good help text in the ArcaneBooks module, but as I was going over the construction of the ArcaneBooks module I realized I’d not written about how to write help in PowerShell. So in this post and the next I’ll address this very topic.

Read on for Robert’s thoughts on the topic, including standard ways to add content comments so Powershell’s built-in Get-Help cmdlet works for you.

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Documenting Group Policy Objects with Powershell

Published 2023-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer builds a report:

Active Directory Group Policies (GPO) enables you to control user and computer settings. It is important to document them. In this blog post I am going to show you two PowerShell commands which create a GPO HTML Report. Let’s dive in.

To store all GPO Settings from all GPOs in one file run this command. Don’t forget to provide your domain name and the path of the report file.

Click through for that code snippet, as well as another one which builds an HTML report for each GPO.

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Parsing Library of Congress Data with Powershell

Published 2023-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on books:

For this demo, we’ll be using an LCCN of 54-9698, Elements of radio servicing by William Marcus. When we call the web API URL in our web browser, we get the following data.

Click through for the results of the API call, which happen to be a blob of XML data. Robert shows how to get that data programmatically, then how to shred it into what he needs.

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Finding Special Characters in Powershell

Published 2023-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer looks for special characters:

Sometimes special characters are a nuisance. If you are trying to create some user accounts in on-premise or cloud environments, you should avoid special characters in usernames. In this blog post I will show how to find this special characters.

Click through for a regular expression-based approach, which also allows you to exclude special but not special enough characters.

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Building Strings in Powershell with StringBuilder

Published 2023-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain takes to a .NET class to build some strings:

As I was creating the next post in my ArcaneBooks series, I realized I had not written about the StringBuilder class. As the code in my ArcaneBooks module relies on it in several places, I thought it best to add a new post to my Fun With PowerShell series explaining how to use it before continuing.

It’s a common need in any language, and PowerShell is no exception, to need to add more text to an existing string.

Read on to understand why the StringBuilder class exists and how to use it. If you’re doing a lot of string manipulation, particularly of large strings in loops, this can provide a noticeable performance impact.

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Building a Wordle Solver in Powershell and T-SQL

Published 2023-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill takes this T-SQL Tuesday to heart:

I got swept up in that wave for a while in the same way I got swept up in the other trends of my time, like Pokemon, Sodoku, and Angry Birds.

Eventually, I stopped when I found a PowerShell script by Kieran Walsh ( github | twitter ) where you could narrow down to the correct answer by putting in the results of your guess each round.

This hack led to me realising how much time I was spending on Wordle and that I should stop, much like I did with Pokemon, Sodoku, and Angry Birds.

So, what better thing to do than to try and recreate that PowerShell script in T-SQL

And given Shane’s time restriction, I’d say the end result is a good one.

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The Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN)

Published 2023-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on book archival:

This is part of my ongoing series on my ArcaneBooks project. The goal is to provide a module to retrieve book data via provided web APIs. In the SEE ALSO section later in this post I’ll provide links to previous posts which cover the background of the project, as well as how to use the OpenLibrary APIs to get data based on the ISBN.

In this post I will provide an overview of using the Library of Congress API to get data based on the LCCN, short for Library of Congress Control Number.

This has been an interesting series to watch, as it’s a practical application of non-work use of a series of practical development skills.

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Putting tempdb on an Azure VM Temp Disk

Published 2023-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Hutmacher uses a temp disk for a temp database:

Almost all Azure virtual machine sizes come with a temporary disk. The temporary disk is a locally attached SSD drive that comes with a couple of desirable features if you’re installing a SQL Server on your VM:

  • Because it is locally attached, it has lower latency than regular disks.
  • IO and storage are not billed like regular storage.

As the name implies, the temporary disk is not persistent, meaning that it will be wiped if you shut down your VM or if the VM moves to another VM host (as part of maintenance or troubleshooting). For that reason, we never want to put anything on the temporary disk that we need to keep.

I’d say this was a lot more popular several years ago, back when spinning disk was the default for Azure storage. There can still be benefits from doing this, though if you’re using Premium storage with high IOPS, the biggest remaining benefit is around latency.

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Digging into the OpenLibrary ISBN API

Published 2023-04-05 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain is looking for a book:

The format of the Advanced API is slightly different from the simple. Here is template.

https://openlibrary.org/api/books?bibkeys=ISBN:[ISBN Goes Here]&jscmd=data&format=json"

You will replace the [ISBN Goes Here] text with the ISBN number you want to look up. Be aware this can only be digits, you must remove any spaces, dashes, or other characters.

Let’s look at a code example of calling the API and getting all its properties.

Click through for examples and how you can use Powershell to parse the results.

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