Confessions of a Microsoft Consultant

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PowerShell Script ExecutionPolicy

Seeing as PowerShell is included by default in Windows 7, and also because you get the PowerShell icon on your quick launch bar by default, I try to use that over the de rigueur cmd.exe command interpreter that we have all had since the dawn of time. Read More...

Posted Wednesday, August 05, 2009 8:59 AM by Daniel Oxley | 0 Comments

Filed under: Scripting, Tips, PowerShell

VBS Functions

The lack of a decent GUI for VBS development has always been a problem for most people. The advantages of using VBS are great, but writing the scripts can be labourious, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience and know all the commands/functions Read More...

Posted Monday, April 13, 2009 12:45 PM by Daniel Oxley | 1 Comments

Filed under: Scripting

Faster Creation of Virtual Machines

I recently noticed a blog post on TechNet about a new tool that was released on CodePlex. WIM2VHD is a command-line tool allows you to create sysprepped VHD images from any Windows 7 installation source (and I suspect Windows Server 2008 R2 as well) Read More...

Posted Wednesday, April 08, 2009 8:55 AM by Daniel Oxley | 0 Comments

Filed under: Scripting, Hyper-V, Server 2008, Tips, Windows 7, Server 2008 R2

Self-writing code

If you do a lot of scripting for Windows, then you probably use VBScript (VBS) to do it. With VBScript you can easily retrieve information about pretty much anything that is in your computer, or connected to the network, which is what makes it a good Read More...

Posted Tuesday, November 18, 2008 12:30 PM by Daniel Oxley | 1 Comments

Filed under: Windows, Scripting

Job/Life/Reputation protector 2.0

Back in January I posted some simple VBA code for adding an “are you sure?” type question to the Reply To All button in Outlook. Since then I have received a few suggestions for improving the code, one of the most common of which was to add to the question Read More...

Posted Monday, November 10, 2008 12:58 PM by Daniel Oxley | 4 Comments

Filed under: Scripting, Office, VBA, Security, Misc, Tips

HTAMount – Simplifying the mounting of Hyper-V VHD files to your computer

HTAMount is a HTML application that I wrote a while ago that provides a no-nonsense interface allowing you to mount/unmount offline Hyper-V virtual disk images (VHD) to your local file system, in read-only mode. It consists of a HTML Application (HTA) Read More...

Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 11:38 AM by Daniel Oxley | 1 Comments

Filed under: Windows, Scripting, Hyper-V, Server 2008

Attachment(s): HTAMount v0.2.zip

Doesn't this thing go any faster?

A Knowledge Base (KB) article and related software update was released on the May 20th 2008 that seems to have gone fairly unnoticed by quite a few people. The article ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952830 ) is rather vaguely titled "Description Read More...

Posted Tuesday, August 05, 2008 9:41 AM by Daniel Oxley | 0 Comments

Filed under: Windows, XP, Scripting

Gulp! Did I really just send that to the entire company...?

I am sure that it has happened to everyone in some way or another. You receive an e-mail from a colleague and decide to reply with some harmless comment/joke/snide remark/insult/opinion* but without realising that you pressed the 'Reply To All' button, Read More...

Posted Wednesday, January 23, 2008 11:47 AM by Daniel Oxley | 1 Comments

Filed under: Scripting, Office, VBA

Updating your deployment point programmatically

I was asked recently if it was possible to launch an "Update" and/or an "Update (files only)" in MDT via a script as my client did not want to open the MMC console just to update their Distribution Point. Well, yes it is possible Read More...

Posted Tuesday, January 08, 2008 2:17 PM by Daniel Oxley | 1 Comments

Filed under: Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Scripting

Creating a WIM the quick way...

IMAGEX is a fantastic tool, but it has a command line that can, at times, be way too complicated. As of yet, there is no official, nice, easy-to-use interface or GUI to simplify the whole thing although a couple of people have posted DIY ones on the web Read More...

Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007 10:28 PM by Daniel Oxley | 6 Comments

Filed under: Business Desktop Deployment, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Scripting

Attachment(s): WIMCreate.hta

Junction points with network drives

Ever wanted to create a 'junction point' style pointer but using a network drive as the source? Now you can! With Windows XP you can create junction points on your disks but the prerequisite is that the source point is on your local disk. This is no good Read More...

Posted Monday, November 26, 2007 9:01 AM by Daniel Oxley | 7 Comments