After three years (2015, 2016, 2017) of publishing yearly goals, I’ve decided to not do that this year. One reason is that I’ve not done a great job of keeping these goals in the forefront of my mind, so they haven’t (for the most part) been achieved. I definitely fell off the wagon a few …
One of the great things about doing Office automation (that is, COM automation of Office apps) is that all of the examples are filled with tons of references to constants. A goal of VisioBot3000 was to make using those constants as easy as possible. I mentioned the issue of having so many constants to deal …
I’ve been blogging here since 2009. In that time, I’ve tried to focus on surprising topics, or at least topics that were things I had recently learned or encountered. One big problem with that approach is that it makes it much more difficult to produce content. I really enjoy writing, and I’m teaching PowerShell very …
Continue reading ‘Get-Learning – Introducing a new series of PowerShell Posts’ »
A quick one because it’s Friday night. I recently found myself translating some C# code into PowerShell. If you’ve done this, you know that most of it is really routine. Change the order of some things, change the operators, drop the semicolons. In a few places you have to do some adjusting, like changing using …
Continue reading ‘Calling Extension Methods in PowerShell’ »
Positional Parameters Whether you know it or not, if you’ve used PowerShell, you’ve used positional parameters. In the following command the argument (c:\temp) is passed to the -Path parameter by position. The other option for passing a parameter would be to pass it by name like this: It makes sense for some commands to allow …
Continue reading ‘Specifying PowerShell Parameter Position’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Missing the Point with PowerShell Error Handling’ »
There has been a lot of PowerShell activity in Missouri lately. I started the Southwest Missouri PSUG in June and have had 4 successful meetings covering the following topics: June – organizational July – Error Handling August – Pester September – DSC I also spoke at the St. Louis PSUG in August (on Error Handling). Ken Maglio …
This week, I (finally) hit 10,000 points on StackOverflow. On some level, I know it’s just fake internet points, but it’s a nice milestone. Like everyone I know in IT, I often find useful answers to questions I have on StackOverflow. Since there are so many answered questions on that site, I generally don’t even …
Continue reading ‘Celebrating Fake Internet Points in the PowerShell Community’ »
Back in January I wrote a post about how VisioBot3000 had been broken for a while, and my attempts to debug and/or diagnose the problem. In the process of developing a minimal example that illustrated the “breakage”, I noticed that accessing certain Visio object properties caused the code to work, even if the values of …
Continue reading ‘Voodoo PowerShell – VisioBot3000 Lives Again!’ »
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 …
