Git – The 5 Percent that I Always Use

One of the reasons I got into IT was that I really enjoy learning new things. Unfortunately, there are so many things to learn that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Does it make sense to do a deep-dive into each technology that you use, or does it sometimes make sense to skim the cream off …

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A Modest Proposal about PowerShell Strings

If you’ve used the PowerShell Script Analyzer before you are probably aware that you shouldn’t be using double-quoted strings if there aren’t any escape characters, variables, or subexpressions in them.  The analyzer will flag unnecessary double-quotes as problems.  That is because double-quoted strings are essentially expressions that PowerShell needs to evaluate. Let me repeat that… Double-quoted …

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Old School PowerShell Expressions vs New

In a recent StackOverflow answer, I wrote the following PowerShell to find parameters that were in a given parameter set (edited somewhat for purposes of this post): A quick note…it’s not correct. It only shows parameters that are explicitly in the parameter set. Items that aren’t marked with any parameter set are in all parameter …

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Missing the Point with PowerShell Error Handling

I’ve been using PowerShell for about 10 years now.  Some might think that 10 years makes me an expert.  I know that it really means I have more opportunities to learn.  One thing that has occurred to me in the last 4 or 5 months is that I’ve been missing the point with PowerShell error …

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Get-Command, Aliases, and a Bug

I stumbled across some interesting behavior the other day as I was demonstrating something that I understand pretty well. [Side note…this is a great way to find out things that you don’t know…confidently explain how something works, and demo it.] I was asked to give an overview of how modules work in PowerShell. I’ve been …

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Some small PowerShell bugs I’ve found lately

I love PowerShell. Everyone who knows me knows that. Recently, though, I seem to be running into more bugs. I’m not complaining, because PowerShell does tons of amazing things and the problems I’m encountering don’t have a huge impact. With that said, here they are. Pathological properties in Out-GridView PowerShell has always allowed us to …

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Debugging VisioBot3000

The Setup Sometime around late August of 2016, VisioBot3000 stopped working.  It was sometime after the Windows 10 anniversary update, and I noticed that when I ran any of the examples in the repo, PowerShell hung whenever it tried to place a container on the page. I had not made any recent changes to the code. …

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Module Structure Preferences (and my module history)

Modules in the Olden Days Back in PowerShell 1.0 days, there were no modules.  Uphill both ways.  In 1.0, we only had script files.  That means you had a couple of choices when it came to deploying functions.  Either you put a bunch of functions in a .ps1 file and dot-sourced it, or you used …

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VisioBot3000 Settings Import

It’s been a while since I last spoke about VisioBot3000.  I’ve got the project to a reasonably stable point…not quite feature complete but I don’t see a lot of big changes. One of the things I found even as I wrote sample diagram scripts was that quite a bit of the script was taken up …

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