April, 2006

<WIZARD WARNING> Dreeschkind posted a question in the Microsoft.Public.Windows.Server.Scripting newsgroup about how PowerShell formatting worked with Select. He saw some behavior that he thought was a bug. Here is what he saw: PoSh C:\>...

MMS in San Diego was a great conference! I met lots of customers that asked lots of great questions. I was demonstrating PowerShell's WMI support when a customer asked about controlling the output. The problem was that PowerShell was showing all the WMI...

Check out the interview that Scott Ottaway and I did with Scott Fulton of Tom's Hardware : http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/04/25/powershell_windows_command_line_to_ship_q4/ Tom's has consistently been a source of good information about this project - going...

Superstar Bruce Payette is writing a book focused on the whats and whys of the language called PowerShell in Action . Bruce is the dev lead on the language and is a walking encyclopedia of computer languages. I have the honor of being a technical reviewer...

PowerShell is a great interactive shell and a great scripting language. That said, the feedback from the scripting community has been very clear: they want/need a PowerShell Scripting IDE. As such, I was very happy to finally have something to say...

One of the nicest new features in the latest drop of Windows PowerShell is enhanced tab-completion. We now tab-complete properties on variables and parameters on cmdlets in addition to the old filename completion. But that's not the interesting part....

One of our primary goals for Monad was to: "Expose the power of .NET in an Admin-friendly way" . The challenges of systems administration are large and growing at the same time organizations are under ever more pressure to reduce costs and do more...

In Monad, mshsnapins can be installed in a different directory from the Monad executables. At runtime, the Monad engine will load the mshsnapin assembly and its referenced assemblies based on application base information provided during mshsnapin installation...

So how come we have three ways to filter a path in most of the core cmdlets such as in the get-item cmdlet. It is important to understand that exclude, include, and filter offer different levels of filtering. So let’s give a few examples of how...

Some applications launch themselves whenever you start your computer and load Windows. In most cases, this is the desired behavior. However in some instances, malicious programs such as spyware, Trojans, worms, viruses load in this manner and hijack your...

Hopefully you've read the previous entries on how to create MshSnapins to include your own cmdlets/providers without having to create an entire separate executable (custom shell). If you didn't or if you did and you don't feel like writing the extra...

In order to prevent a mass usability nightmare with developers picking their own improvised cmdlet verbs, the Monad team, based on customer feedback, decided to enforce the use approved verbs. The idea is to provide a more uniform and consistent...

Tony has a very cool series of Monad-oriented blog entries at: http://mshforfun.blogspot.com/ . I was fascinated by this one: http://mshforfun.blogspot.com/2005/12/ncbi-blastn-under-msh-command-line.html which exposes the NCBI BLAST tool via a command...

In response to the recent Days till Xmas post, applepwc asked the question > where can I find more ".NET types"?I mean is there a list of ".NET type" available in monad? Excellent question but there are a number of aspects to it so let's break it...

As Jeff re y mentioned in an earlier Blog “ Finding which parameters are used the most ” The Monad team is in the process of cleaning up our cmdlets to promote a more consistent user experience . The following two areas which we are focused on might have...

My daughter loves christmas. She often asks me, "how long is it till christmas?" The problem with that is that I'm one of those people that can barely remember what year it is much less the date. Well, it is one thing to be a flawed person and its another...

We are in the process of cleaning up our Cmdlets and ensuring that they are consistent. One of the things we want to do is the ensure that we provide Aliases for ParameterNames. As a general rule, parameternames are not pithy. That is great for reading...

Last time somebody asked for an example of a C# method that took a scriptblock. First of all, there’s one very important thing you have to know about scriptblocks as they are currently implemented. They can’t be invoked outside of a runspace. Any attempt...

When I was a Monad neophyte, I was asked to write a Cmdlet taking a file path as a parameter. A big mistake I made was not keeping in mind that in Monad the FileSystem provider was just one of the many providers. (This makes Monad different from many...

Now that you know how to create an MshSnapIn, you might want to add help content for all those cmdlets that you developed and get them displayed by “get-help” cmdlet. To add help content you must know how a Monad Cmdlet Help file looks. See any of the...

With the MshSnapIn model in Beta 3, there is no gaurantee that a certain Cmdlet or Provider, apart from those in the default MshSnapIns, is available at any point. There could be a number of reasons. The MshSnapIn may not have been installed. The MshSnapIn...

With Monad Beta 3 release, we've introduced the concept of the "single shell". What is a single shell? "One shell to rule them all ... and in the darkness..." (Sorry I can't stop saying that quote everytime I hear "single shell"!) Well rather than having...

To develop a mshsnapin, you can use following three simple steps, Create a class derived from MshSnapIn class. Build an assembly to contain the mshsnapin class created in step1 and also other cmdlet/provider classes to be included in the mshsnapin...

Latest beta3 release of monad added the capability of adding/removing cmdlets and providers in current running session through mshsnapins. Mshsnapin is a logic group of cmdlets and providers can be manipulate as a unit in monad engine. Following commands...

In case you were wondering, yes, you can use Monad for your logon scripts. You can't just assign a .MSH file as a logon script however, since only file types with file associations work as logon scripts. Monad installation doesn't create a file association...