Shay Levy

It's that time of the year which feels like having a second birthday. I'm proud to announce that I was awarded the MVP title once again. This is my 6th year in a row as a PowerShell MVP, and hopefully not my last! Thank you all, Lechaim!!

Source: PowerShellMagazine.com   If you’ve updated PowerShell to version 3.0 you probably noticed that help is no longer shipped in the box. PowerShell 3.0 includes a new feature, the Updatable Help system, which allows you to ensure that help on the local computer stays up to date. PowerShell is now a part of the operating system and operating systems gets to be updated only during service packs or specific patches. The Updatable Help system and its cmdlets (*-Help) make it easy to download and install help files, or updating exiting help files, as soon as newer...

Hi, it’s been a while since my last post, I’ve been busy mostly at work and also by investing most of my time running the PowerShell Magazine website together with my friends. I hope to post more in the future. For the time being, here’s my latest post, cross-posted on the PowerShell Magazine. Working with CSV files in PowerShell is a common practice. You import the file, loop on its records and you’re good to go. Sometimes however you may find yourself in a situation where you get a file that has blank lines in it, and those...

I’ve just received THE email from Microsoft… I’m a PowerShell MVP for another year! I am very honored! This is my 5th renewal and I would like to take this opportunity and say thank you to Microsoft and to all the people who supported me.

Until PowerShell 3.0, if you shipped a cmdlet there was no good way to deprecate it. Cmdlet developers can use the .NET ObsoleteAttribute now to let users know that they should not use a cmdlet anymore. In the following example, the cmdlet can run but it will issue a warning that another cmdlet should be used from now on. This gives the user time to prepare for the change and fix any scripts dependent on old commands. $code = @' using System; using System.Management.Automation; namespace ObsoleteCmdlet { ...

Starting with PowerShell 3.0, we now have another cool way to create new objects. We can create them by calling the default constructor of the type and initializing its properties with a cast: @{X=1;Y=2} We put the type in square brackets and assign it a hash table containing the properties we want to initialize. Looking at this example got me thinking, how can I know the properties I can set for a specific class/type? As a learning tool, I wrote the Get-HashType function. Give it a type name and it will tell you the properties...

Creating functions in PowerShell is relatively a simple operation. You declare the function’s name and value, press the Enter key and you’re good to go. It is also very simple to override the function just by re-creating it; that’s all it takes, simple and easy. What if you need to prevent that from happening? You don’t want to allow someone or something from overriding your functions? PowerShell gives us the option to do that via a dynamic parameter. Dynamic parameters are cmdlet parameters that are added by a Windows PowerShell provider and are available only when...

In PowerShell 3.0 we can now create new custom objects using a hash table. PS> @{ One = 1 Two = 2 Three = 3 Four = 4 Five = 5 } One : 1 Two : 2 Three : 3 Four : 4 Five : 5 Behind the scenes, PowerShell creates a hash table and wraps it a PSCustomObject. It is way faster than using the New-Object cmdlet and it also provides consistency, while maintaining backwards compatibility. Another benefit of using...

PowerShell 3.0 offers new ways to add Note properties to objects. In PowerShell 2.0, a typical command to do that would look like: PS> New-Object -TypeName PSObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name One -Value 1 -PassThru One --- 1   And when adding multiple note properties: PS> New-Object -TypeName PSObject | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name One -Value 1 -PassThru | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name Two -Value 2 -PassThru | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name Three -Value 3 -PassThru One Two Three --- --- ----- 1 ...

The Measure-Object cmdlet gives us a great way to find minimum and maximum values in a collection of objects. For example, if we want to know the smallest and largest size of a file in the current directory: PS> Get-ChildItem | Measure-Object -Property Length -Minimum -Maximum Count : 2751 Average : Sum : Maximum : 56297240 Minimum : 35 Property : Length In PowerShell 2.0 it only worked with numeric properties (integers), we couldn't use it to compare properties like LastWriteTime (DateTime). In PowerShell 3.0 we can now use...