I’m officially an idiot. I am in good company, though. The funny (not really funny) thing, is that I read Jeff’s post 2 years ago and did absolutely nothing about it. So when my hosting provider had some issues and rebuilt the server this site is on, I was completely unprepared (i.e. I had no [...]
PowerShell Tools and Books That I Use (Revisited)
A friend of mine found this blog yesterday and commented on “PowerShellToolsandBooksThatIUse“. I thought that it would be good to update the list since it’s almost 2 years old. The changes are mostly incremental: version changes, a few new items, a few I don’t use much anymore. Without further ado, here we go (now with [...]
A few functions for working with SQL Agent Job data
If you’ve ever looked at sysjobhistory, you know that the way SQL Server stores datetimes and durations in this table are not very friendly. Well, that’s not quite true. They are human-readable if they are small, but if you’ve got a job that runs for hours (days?), it becomes more and more difficult. For example, [...]
Powershellstation.com has moved
I mentioned a while back that I was thinking about moving my site to NoSupportLinuxHosting.com. They offer $1 per month basic shared hosting with the caveat that they don’t provide tech support. Since I’m not doing anything fancy on this site (i.e. hosting wordpress only), and I’m not to the point where I need to [...]
Happy (Belated) Anniversary!
I didn’t manage to post anything on the 1 year anniversary of powershellstation.com, but I did remember. I was hoping to have posted more, but all in all, it wasn’t a bad year. I have some plans for this year: Write a post or 2 about remoting Kill off the powershellworkbench project (I can’t stand writing [...]
My new favorite cmdlet: set-strictmode
If you’ve ever written Visual Basic or VB.Net code, you’re aware that it’s highly recommended that you use “Option Strict” in all of your code. Similarly, Perl scripters have a “use strict” that comes highly suggested. The idea of these options is that there’s quite a bit of flexibility built into these languages, and sometimes [...]
The Identity Function
In mathematics, an identity function is a function that returns the arguments that are passed to it unchanged. While the concept of an identity function is quite often useful in formulating proofs, it is not something that I ever expected to use in a programming environment. Here’s the identity function written in PowerShell: function identity{ [...]
New Versions of PowerShell Community Extensions (PSCX) and SQL PowerShell Extensions (SQLPSX)
In case you haven’t heard, the PowerShell Community Exetensions (PSCX) and SQL PowerShell Extensions (SQLPSX) projects have both recently released version 2.0 (and each followed shortly after with quick bug fixes). Both 2.0 releases are module-based and include advanced functions to solve lots of frequently encountered problems. If you haven’t ever used these toolsets, I [...]