"Live" PowerShell Tool Making Part 1
I want to try something new, and I expect it will take more than one article, which is why this is titled Part 1. Last week I introduced you to creating...
Building Command Parameters with Crescendo
In the previous article, we began exploring the process of using the Crescendo module. This module is designed to make it easier to wrap native command-line...
Building to a Command
noun: crescendo; plural noun: crescendos; plural noun: crescendi1.the loudest point reached in a gradually increasing sound.a gradually increasing sound2.the...
Coding Confirmed Commands
Let’s pick up where we left off in the last article. We’ve been looking at adding support for -WhatIf and -Confirm to your PowerShell commands. You get these...
Should I Stay or Should I Process Now?
One of my goals for this newsletter is to help you write better PowerShell scripts. More than that, I want to provide the information you need to create...
Secret Store Automation
In the last article, I introduced you to the secrets management tools from Microsoft. This toolset provides a secure way to store information like...
Can You Keep a Secret
In the last article, I introduced using CMS messages to protect sensitive information. This is a good technique for encrypting a block of text, but probably...
Getting the Message in PowerShell
One of the challenges with scripting in PowerShell is to protect sensitive information. We all know it is bad practice to hard-code credentials and passwords...
A Changelog for the Better
It is a new year which means it is time for a few resolutions. One change I have in mind for the new year is maintaining better change logs for my PowerShell...
Creating a Learning Plan for 2023
Congratulations! You made it through another year. This was not an easy year for the tech industry. Every day I read about more layoffs and re-organizations....
Clean Text Files with Regular Expressions Revisited
In the November 2022 Ask Jeff article, I shared a simple regular expression pattern you could use to filter out blank and commented lines, using a #...
Cleaning Your PowerShell House
As you develop your PowerShell scripting skills, you will advance from creating simple scripts to writing advanced functions that consume pipeline input and...
Climbing Higher in the Abstract Syntax Tree
In the previous article, I introduced you to the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree). This is how PowerShell parses your commands and scripts. Tools like VS Code take...
Climbing the Abstract Syntax Tree
If you’ve been using PowerShell for any length of time, you’ve noticed that features like tab completion fail if there is an error in your command. Or when...
Critiquing Code Comments
I am assuming that if you are reading this article, you are writing PowerShell code. I assume you are at least writing simple PowerShell scripts. Probably...
Leveraging PSObject
In the last article, we dove into the internals of how PowerShell creates and defines objects. It doesn’t matter if it is the result from running Get-Process...
Building PowerShell Objects
One reason that PowerShell is so valuable to IT professionals is that a great deal of work went into it to take advantage of the .NET Framework but not...
Hanging by a Thread
Over the last few weeks, we've been exploring techniques and concepts that you can use to scale your PowerShell scripting. Time is valuable, and there is...
More Runspaces and Parallel Processing
In the last article, we began exploring alternatives that would allow us to scale commands. This is especially useful for commands that might take long to...
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You’ve heard me talk about “managing at scale” in previous articles. If you can do something to one thing, you can most likely do it for hundreds or...
