Category: Powershell

Slava Murygin shows how to use Powershell to read the Registry:

Do you use third party tools to document state of your SQL Server?
If not, that script is for you!

At first, you will know what is your SQL Server is up to.
At second, that might be your baseline document, to which you can compare a current SQL Server state over the time.
At third, that is a priceless piece of documentation!!! (I mean FREE!!!) which you can put in a folder and report to your boss.

Registry settings are a good part of a baseline, particularly a security baseline.

Wayne Sheffield has a Powershell cmdlet to find sessions matching SQL Saturday topics:

The output to the screen is the Event #, Speaker, Session Title and URL for the presentation.

The generated export file will also include the event name and session abstract. Additionally, the URL will be encased with the Excel HYPERLINK() function. When the export file is opened up with Excel, clicking the URL will open your browser to the session information, where the presentation material can be downloaded.

I hope that you get a lot of use out of this script.

Click through for the script and more details.

Thomas Rushton wants to customize his Powershell prompt:

By default, your PowerShell prompt is “PS <<path>> >”. So normal; so dull. However, that can be easily changed. In my case, I want to add:

• the current time (well, the time at which the prompt was generated)
• a reminder which account I’m using (I have two – a “normal user” one, and a “DBA/SU” one
• a countdown of seconds remaining until my next holiday

Oh, and I still need to see the current path.

Very interesting.  By contrast, here’s how to change a Bash prompt.

Cody Konior has a beef with Powershell workflows:

That’s inexplicable.

One thing which does make it all work is setting $PSRunInProcessPreference which, “If this variable is specified, all activities in the enclosing scope are run in the workflow process.” Unfortunately that doesn’t explain what’s really going on and what the impacts are, so I won’t use it. But here it is turning the original failing script into a working one.

I’ve never used Powershell workflows.  It sounds like potentially an exasperating experience.

Rob Sewell has an update to the Start-Demo cmdlet, making it no longer require backticks when running multi-line commands:

Start-Demo was written in 2007 by a fella who knows PowerShell pretty well 🙂 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2007/03/03/start-demo-help-doing-demos-using-powershell/

It was then updated in 2012 by Max Trinidad http://www.maxtblog.com/2012/02/powershell-start-demo-now-allows-multi-lines-onliners/

This enabled support for multi-line code using backticks at the end of each line. This works well but I dislike having to use the backticks in foreach loops, it confuses people who think that they need to be included and to my mind looks a bit messy

I’m going to need to look into Start-Demo; I’m not sure I’ve seen it before.

Richie Lee has a Powershell snippet to replace text:

Below is a function that will search in  a string and replace a character in a variable. Simple enough. It generally saves time in calling this from a helper file in source control for tidying up variables that are passed in to a Powershell function that aren’t quite formatted as required. A good example of this is upstream build variables with spaces in TeamCity.

Click through for the script.

Allison Tharp is starting to learn Powershell:

PowerShell is developed by Microsoft, specifically for task automation and configuration management.  A shell is a user interface that gives the user access to services of an operating system.  The shell you are likely most familiar with is the Command Prompt.  PowerShell is like the Command Prompt in many ways, but it is much more powerful.

PowerShell is based on the .Net framework and is considered a scripting language.  Windows also developed the Windows PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment).  This is a GUI that lets us make scripts without having to type all of the commands into the command line.

I highly recommend learning Powershell if you’re in the Windows administration space.  It’s not quite as useful on the development side (where you can quickly throw together a .NET app) but it’s great for scripting out those admin tasks.