Understanding TempDB Contention

PowerShell 3.0 and later Out-GridView is a very useful cmdlet to output results to an extra window. Unlike outputting to the console, Out-GridView will not cut off anything. And it has a not-so-obvious way of easily copying the information to other applications. Try...

All PowerShell versions Typically, NTFS permissions in the file system are inherited. You can, however, add explicit permissions to files and folders. To find out where inheritance was changed and direct security settings have been added, you can use this code sample:...

All Versions Typically, to access COM objects, these objects need to register themselves in the Windows Registry, and PowerShell needs the registered ProgID string to load the object. Here is an example: $object = New-Object -ComObject Scripting.FileSystemObject...

GroupPolicy Module When you create a new Group Policy, you can set a comment (or description). There is no apparent way, however, to change the description later. Here is code that allows you to retrieve a group policy, then read and/or change the description. Make...

All PowerShell versions With Get-Acl, you can output the security information from files and folders as plain text in SDDL format (Security Descriptor Definition Language): $FolderToRead = 'C:\folder1' $securityDescriptor = Get-Acl -Path $FolderToRead...

All PowerShell Versions Here is a clever trick how to find out how many lines a string (not a string array!) contains: $text = @' This is some sample text Let's find out the number of lines. '@ $text.Length - $text.Replace("`n",'').Length...

All PowerShell Versions To find the smallest and largest item in a range of numbers, use Measure-Object: $list = 1,4,3,1,3,12,990 $result = $list | Measure-Object -Minimum -Maximum $result.Minimum $result.Maximum This works for any input data and any data type. Here...

All PowerShell versions When you use Get-ChildItem to get a list of files, you may have noticed that the -Filter parameter occasionally returns more files than you’ve expected. Here is an example of this. This line does not just return files with a...

Test-Path can test whether or not a given file or folder exists. This works fine for paths that use a drive letter, but can fail with pure UNC paths. At its simplest, this should return $true, and it does (provided you did not disable your administrative shares):...

Credential objects contain a username and a password. You can create them using Get-Credential, and then supply this object to any cmdlet that has the -Credential parameter. However, what do you do if you want your scripts to run without user intervention yet...

Beginning in PowerShell 3.0, there is a new automatic variable available called $PSScriptRoot. This variable previously was only available within modules. It always points to the folder the current script is located in (so it only starts to be useful once you actually...