In Part one I showed how my downloadable PowerShell module can tag photos using related data – like GPS position – which was logged as they were being taken, and in part two I showed how I’d extended the module in James Brundage’s  PowerPack for Windows 7. Now I want to explain the extensions which...

In part one of this series I showed the finished version of photo-tagging script I’ve been using. I based my work (which is available for download ) on James Brundage’s PSImageTools module for PowerShell which is part of the PowerPack included with the Windows 7 Resource kit (and downloadable independently...

Well… I have been off for a bit and you can have a read of the previous post for some background on that. During that time I’ve done a lot of walking, taking photos as I go.  Having raved about my HTC Touch pro 2 and its GPS I’ve been using it to GeoTag those photos. Naturally (for me) PowerShell...

Last week I watched a TV program called Michelin Stars, The Madness of Perfection it talked about the pressure Chefs put themselves under - sometimes tragically so . The presenter was a restaurant critic and in talking to one of his fellow critics they talked about a problem – not exclusively a Michelin...

PowerShell has been taking more than its fair share of my time of late and I need redress the balance a bit – just not quite yet. Powershell and redirection. I’ve been working on my hyper-V library for codeplex and this has separate files for every command, and then to keep the start-up process for the...

Before Christmas I wrote about the conclusion I was forming on PowerShell parameters: Vague is good . The Christmas season is when my parents used to get various kinds of puzzles out and most of my puzzles these day seem to be PowerShell type things rather than Jigsaws and Crosswords. My equivalent of...

One of the PowerShell tools I’ve been using a lot recently is Select-String : Going through lots of files trying to find a mistake I know is in several of them – can just bang in select-string -SimpleMatch "Split-path" -Path *.ps1 –list | edit Finding text in files is not exactly radical...

In the previous post I gave some of the background to regular expression and how they might be used. I thought I’d give a few examples. 1. Checking paths. Quite a few of my functions take paths to Hyper-V virtual hard disk files as parameters and I don’t want to force the user to type “.VHD”, so I also...

One of the good things in PowerShell is support for regular expressions – in fact I suspect some Unix sys-admins might laugh their Windows counterparts for not got to grips regular expressions sooner. The downside is that regular expressions are an area which give a lot people a serious headache. So...

In the previous post I talked about the template I have for many of my PowerShell functions. And I've talked before about adding support for ShouldProcess to functions which change the state of the system ( that allows –confirm, -prompt, –whatif and –verbose switches). Since then I’ve learnt that functions...

There is a theme which I’ve found has come up in several places with PowerShell. Giving flexibility to the user can mean being vague about parameters – or at least not being excessively precise. Consider these examples from my Hyper-V library for PowerShell 1. The user can specify one or more virtual...

Information week published an article last week “ 9 Reasons why enterprises shouldn’t switch to hyper-v”. The Author is Elias Khnaser, this is his website and this is the company he works for .  A few people have taken him to task over it, including Aidan . I’ve covered all the points he made, most...

I was chatting with a couple of colleagues yesterday about internet explorer. Someone grumbled “When people think of browser add-ons they automatically think of firefox, but there are some really good ones for IE”. I have talked in the past about IE7 pro (which despite the name works with IE8). I use...

I was pleased to get asked to record a Podcast with Jonathan and Alan to become episode 14 of their get-scripting series. To be honest to be asked to sit and chat about PowerShell with these guys – especially when they invite someone like Thomas Lee to join us – well it’s more fun than work – and then...

For a little while I have had a beta version of a project I call PSCONFIG on codeplex. I’ve changed a couple of things but from the people who have given it a try, it seems that it is working pretty well. It’s aimed at servers running either Hyper-V server R2 Or Core installations Windows Server 2008...

Attached to this post is a Zip file containing Twitter.ps1 the PowerShell script I use to get information from Twitter, and since the word cloud work grew out of that it has ended up in the same file. It also contains noise.dat the list of noise words which you can customize. If you want to use it...

I’ve been playing with word clouds on and off for the last couple of months, and finally I’ve decided the time has come to share what I have been doing. Word clouds turn up in all sorts of places, and I wanted to produce something which could take any text, be customized, and let me edit the the final...

There is a problem which comes up in several places in PowerShell – that is helping the user by being vague about parameter types. Consider these examples from my Hyper-V library for PowerShell 1. The user can specify a machine using a string which contains its name Save-VM London-DC or Save-VM *DC,...

In the last could of “change you should make” posts I’ve talked about a couple of things which turn Functions from being the poor-relation of compiled Cmdlets (as they were in PowerShell V1) to first class citizens, under V2. Originally the term “Script Cmdlets” was used but now we call them “Advanced...

A few days back I wrote about PowerShell version 2’s ability to confirm whether it should be changing something . Since I was writing something which would some pretty drastic changes , supporting –WhatIf and –Confirm for almost no effort seems like a huge win. The next thing I wanted to cover was modules...

I have been working on some PowerShell recently to handle the initial setup of a new machine, and I wanted to add the activation. If you do this from a command line it usually using the Software Licence manager script ( slMgr.vbs ) but this is just a wrapper around a couple of WMI objects which are documented...

There will be a couple more posts on changes for V2, of PowerShell but I want to get something really clear up front. All V1 PowerShell should work in V2. Should meaning unless you have been really stupid or are very unlucky; you won’t NEED to change anything. OK, now we’re clear on that here’s something...

One of the first books I read on PowerShell  had a comment about using AD from the PowerShell V1 which amounted to “It’s too hard, don’t bother use VB Script instead”. I’d taken against the book in question (no names no pack drill) – in fact it reminded me of something Dorothy Parker is supposed...

Long, long ago when I was using my first Microsoft product, I knew one way to get input from the user. The product was Commodore BASIC (in those days we wrote it in uppercase and knew it stood for Beginners All-purpose Symbol Instructional Code). and the method was INPUT. This was back in early 1979...

Last week I taught a PowerShell class – the first time in ages I’d gone back to my old role as a trainer, and of the first things we do explaining PowerShell is explain that (a) When PowerShell’s own commands are piped together they pass object with properties – not a text representation of the objects...