I will be doing a private #PowerShell training class in Canberra, Australia in March. Since it is a long trek I’d love to add a second week of work, either training or speaking. I had a second training gig lined up but it fell through. I realize it might be short notice but I’d love to find someone who would like 3-5 days of training the week of March 26, 2012. I’m also open to speaking engagements if I can at least get my expenses covered. I’m willing to travel anywhere in the region: Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia or even Singapore.

If you are interested contact me. I need to make final travel plans in the next few weeks so please don’t wait. This is more or less first come, first served, but I will try to accommodate people as much as I can.

I use hash tables quite a bit and with the impending arrival of PowerShell 3.0 I expect even more so. PowerShell v3 allows you to define a hash table of default parameter values. I’m not going to to cover that feature specifically, but it made me realize I needed a better way to export a hash table, say to a CSV file. So I put together a few functions to do just that.

To walk you through them, here’s a simple hash table.

I want to export this to a CSV file, but because PowerShell is all about the objects, I want to be sure to get the type information as well. Otherwise when I go to importing, everything will be a string. Here’s what I can expect to export:

That looks good. I can take this command and run it through Export-CSV which gives me this file:

Perfect. Later, I will need to import this file and recreate my hash table. I can use Import-CSV as a starting point.

Good so far. All I need to do is create a hash table and add each entry to it. I could do something like this:

But if I do this, everything will be a string. Since I have Type information, let’s use it.

Here I’m taking the Type value from the import and turning it into a System.Type object which I can then use to cast each value to the correct type. I’m checking for the Type property because I might have a CSV file without it. But as long as I have column headings for Key and Value this will work.

I turned all of this into a pair of advanced functions, Export-HashtoCSV and Import-CSVtoHash.

This certainly fulfills my needs. You can download a script file with both functions, including help. As always, enjoy and I hope you’ll let me know how these work out for you.

Today I gave an Live Meeting presentation for the PowerShell Virtual User Group. When the recording is posted I’ll update this post. I spoke about new features in Windows PowerShell 3.0 that I think will make it easier for people to use PowerShell more efficiently. I think they even might find it fun. Here is what I covered.

AGENDA
 New Help Options
 Default Parameter Values
 Simplified Syntax
 Improved Tab Completion
 Redirection Options
 Improved ISE Experience

The presentation started with some introductory slides, but most of the presentation was demo. As promised here is my presentation and a zip files with my demos and sample script.

Here is the link to the recording

A few days ago Boe Prox posted some very nifty PowerShell modules for using the title bar as a ticker for RSS feeds like the weather. I thought this was an awesome idea and an easy way to take advantage of what would otherwise be unused screen space. I was especially intrigued with his use of timer objects and event subscriptions to manage the updating.

Naturally I decided to run with this. My main goal was to take Boe’s fundamental idea and turn it into something more re-usable or extensible. My result is a module called ConsoleTitle.

The overall premise is pretty simple, define a global variable $PSConsoleTitle and use a timer to periodically update the console title bar with this value. During the refresh interval you can run whatever code you like, however you like, to provide a new value to the variable. In the module I’ve included two sample commands, Get-SystemStat and Get-Inspiration. The former uses WMI to gather system information from the local computer.

The other command defines an array of slogans, sayings and suggestions and randomly selects one to use as the title bar text.

The module includes a few commands for working with timer objects. You can use New-Timer in your own scripts. Here’s the function.

And here’s how you might use it.

Think of the module as a framework or SDK for building your own solutions. The module also includes an about topic. I hope you’ll download ConsoleTitleand let me know what you think.

Recently I was tracking down a bug in script for a client. The problem turned out to be a simple typo. I could have easily avoided that by using Set-StrictMode, which I do now, but that’s not what this is about. What I realized I wanted was a way to look at all the for “words” in a script. If I could look at them sorted, then typos would jump out. At least in theory.

My plan was to get the content of a text file or script, use a regular expression pattern to identify all the “words” and then get a sorted and unique list. Here’s what I came up with.

The function uses Get-Content to retrieve the content (what else?!) of the specified file. At the beginning of the function I defined a regular expression object to find “words”.

This is an intentionally broad pattern that searches for anything not a space. The \b element indicates a word boundary. Because this is a REGEX object, I can do a bit more than using a basic -match operator. Instead I’ll use the Matches() method which will return a collection of match objects. I can pipe these to Select-Object retrieving just the Value property. I also use the -Unique parameter to filter out duplicates. Finally the values are sorted.

The matches and filtering are NOT case-sensitive, which is fine for me. With the list I can see where I might have used write-host instead of Write-Host and go back to clean up my code. Let me show you how this works. Here’s a demo script.

The script has some case inconsistencies as well as a typo. I’ve dot sourced the function in my PowerShell session. Here’s what I end up with.

For best results, you need to make sure there are spaces around commands that use the = sign. But now I can scan through the list and pick out potential problems. Sure, Set-StrictMode would help with variable typos but if I had errors in say comment based help, that wouldn’t help. Maybe you’ll find this useful in your scripting work, maybe not. But I hope you learned a few things about working with REGEX objects and unique properties.

Download Get-ContentWords and enjoy.

This past weekend I did an online presentation for a friend of mine who teaches for ITT in Omaha, Nebraska. He wanted me to do a brief talk about what PowerShell is and show how to use it, especially for managing Active Directory. I probably went much longer than I needed but everyone seemed to get a lot out of it. The session was recorded via WebEx. I then transcoded the recording so I could get it up on YouTube. That’s why the screen layout is a little funky and the audio is far from perfect. Still, I hope you find it useful. The presentation has a some slides but is primarily demo, including using the Microsoft Active Directory cmdlets.

You can also download my presentation and a zip filewith my demo scripts.

If you are ready to learn more check out some of the books and training videos in the side bar. Or bring me in to run a private PowerShell class for your organization. Good Luck and Enjoy!

Today’s Friday Fun is a continuation of my exploration of ways to use Start-Job. A few weeks ago I wrote about using Start-Job to create “scheduled” tasks. I realized I could take this further and turn this into a sort of alarm clock. The goal is to execute at command at a given time, but I wanted to make it easy to specify the time. What I have so far is a function called New-Alarm. I have some other ideas and hope to expand this into a module, but for now I thought I’d toss this out to you and get some feedback.

The function includes full help.

To use the function you specify a command string to execute at a given time. The default’s are to run Notepad in 5 minutes. You can either specify an exact time.

Or X number of seconds, minutes or hours.

The first command defines a command string, $s. This creates a temporary file, writes some text to it, displays it with Notepad and then deletes it. The second command creates a new alarm that will invoke the expression in 15 minutes.

For now, the command is passed as text. This is so that I can create an internal scriptblock. I use a Do loop to compare the current time to the alarm time. When the time is right, the command string is executed using Invoke-Expression.

I also add some metadata to the script block which gets written as the job’s result.

Finally, the alarm function allows for an initialization command, like you might use with Start-Job. This permits you to run commands such as importing modules or dot sourcing scripts. I have a function that displays a VB style message box. Here’s how I might use it as an alarm job.

In 5 minutes the alarm will go off and I’ll get this.

Remember, the function is creating new jobs with the Start-Job cmdlet. Which means I can get job results.

What do you think? As I said, I have a few more ideas and there are certainly a few tweaks I can make even to this code. I’ve added my Get-MessageBox function in case you want to toy with that. Download AlarmScripts.zip and let me know what you think.

The Import-CSV cmdlet in PowerShell is incredibly useful. You can take any CSV file and pump objects to the pipeline. The cmdlet uses the CSV header as properties for the custom object.

But there is a downside: all of the properties are strings.

The means some tasks such sorting or filtering will fail. But there are ways to get around this limitation. One way is to use an expression to cast a property to a different type. For example, I want to sort my test data on the Date property, but it needs to be a [DateTime] object to sort properly. Here’s how:

My output object properties are all still strings. All I did was cast the Date property in the Sort expression. Here’s an example using filtering.

These examples are only producing results. More likely I want to import the CSV file as typed objects. Assuming you know in advance the property names and what types you want to use, here’s how you could achieve this.

I imported my CSV file and piped it to Select-Object, using hash tables to redefine the properties with appropriate types. Import-CSV writes a PSCustomObject to the pipeline anyway so using Select-Object has no effect other than giving me typed properties.

Now I can use $data objects anyway I want.

I’m working on something that takes this idea to the next level but it isn’t quite ready for prime time. But I hope this will help manage imported objects a bit more efficiently and let you really take advantage of the PowerShell pipeline.

Today’s Friday Fun comes out of a short exchange I had yesterday with Hal Rottenberg on Google Plus. We were playing around with piping a PowerShell command to Clip.exe which dumps the output to the Windows Clipboard. I got to thinking about taking this a step further based on my needs as a writer. Often I’d like to see the results of a command and then copy and paste the results into whatever I’m working on. In other words, I need to TEE the output to two places.

PowerShell has a cmdlet called Tee-Object that follows this principal. The default behavior is to write output to the pipeline AND send it to a text file.

I’ll see the results and save them to a text file. I can also use this cmdlet to save results to a variable.

One approach I came up with to incorporate with Clip.exe was this:

I don’t get the results immediately to the screen; they are saved to the variable. But at the same time output has been directed to the Windows Clipboard. That could be useful. But you know me, I always have to tinker a bit more and I ended up with a function called Out-Tee.

This simple function takes a PowerShell expression and writes the results to the console using Write-Host and also to the clipboard. The default output will use the current console foreground color. But you can specify any other color that you would use with Write-Host. I even added some alias properties so you can use -foregroundcolor or -fg.

With this function I can see the result and have it dumped to the clipboard. Because the default text color is the same as my session, I don’t see any difference when using Out-Tee.

Or if I want to pretty it up, I can add a little color.

Of course, the clipboard is just text. But now I have something easier to use to save output to the clipboard so I can paste it into my documents, assuming I like the output I see on the screen. The one caveat is that this function only works with successful commands. Errors, warnings, or verbose statements won’t get dumped to the clipboard. I can think of some ways around that which I might try in a future version. But for my immediate needs this works just fine.

Download Out-Tee and give it a try.

I’ve had a few comments and emails lately about my post and script on converting text to objects. I decided the function needed a little more lovin’ so today I have an updated version, complete with comment based help.

Check out the original article to understand the basics. The major change here is the SplitCount parameter. Often you might end up with a line of text like this:

LinkDate : 11/20/2010 4:30:42 AM

The function needs to split the string into an array on the colon. But when you do that, the time stamp will “break”. The answer is to tell the Split operator how many strings to create. The default of 0 will split into all strings.

If I try that with the time stamp string you see the problem.

But now I can specify the number of strings and I get what I need.

The new version of the function incorporates this. I also received a comment about including a skip feature. I kicked that idea around for awhile, but decided in the end that PowerShell already had a mechanism for skipping lines. I wanted to keep my function limited to a single purpose. So if your text output includes a number of lines you want to skip, before you begin converting text to object, use something like this:

The script file with the function, will also create an alias of cto. I hope you’ll download Convert-TexttoObject.-v1.5 and let me know what you think.