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PowerShell can call internal Windows API functions, and in this example, we’d like to show how you can change the show state of an application...

When you create a PowerShell function, all parameters are positional until you start adding the “Position” attribute. Once you start to do this, all...

Retrieving System Profiling Information with systeminfo.exe For ages, systeminfo.exe returned all profiling information for a computer, and could...

Resolving "HTTP 403" Errors in PowerShell Remoting If you use PowerShell remoting and get “HTTP 403” errors, one of the more obscure reasons for...

PowerShell 2+ Sometimes it becomes necessary to replace special characters like German “Umlauts” in order to normalize user names or...

PowerShell 5 The free Microsoft RSAT tools come with a full-blown ActiveDirectory module, but sometimes simple AD tasks can be mastered with just a...

Modifying a Specific Cell in an Excel Spreadsheet Using PowerShell If you need to change the content of a specific cell in an Excel spreadsheet,...

Windows maintains a log file named cbs.log in $env:windir\logs\cbs. It logs various pieces of information related to the Windows trusted installer,...

Generating Temporary Passwords the Easy Way Check out this simple way of creating temporary passwords: You can easily vary the password length: change the number…

Adding New Items to an XML Document Efficiently If you need to add new items to an XML document that already contains such items, the easiest way is...

Bringing a Process Window to the Foreground with PowerShell PowerShell can use Add-Type to access internal Windows API functions. This way, it is...

By default, the Telnet client is disabled on Windows systems. You can easily enable it with a one liner in PowerShell, though. Just launch a...

By default, PowerShell remoting uses Kerberos authentication and works only in domain environments, and only when you specify computer names, not IP...

The Test-Connection cmdlet implements a simple ping to check whether a system responds to an ICMP request. Unfortunately, you cannot specify a...

Using Get-CimInstance as an Alternative to Get-WmiObject PowerShell 3.0 added an alternative to Get-WmiObject: Get-CimInstance seems to work very...

PowerShell has a built-in support to wait until a process or many processes end: simply use Wait-Process. Understanding Data Marts and Dimensional...

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts in PowerShell ISE In the PowerShell ISE, there are two key shortcuts that can help you. Pressing TAB works just like in...

Updating Active Directory User Information with PowerShell If you have installed the free RSAT tools from Microsoft, you can use PowerShell to...

Whenever you add delegation rights to an AD object (i.e. allow a user to manage the members of an organizational unit), you really invoke a change...

Removing Accidental Deletion Protection By default, AD objects are protected from accidental deletion. To remove this protection for all objects in...

In a previous tip you have seen that the PowerShell console supports all characters available in a TrueType font. You just need to convert the...

Did you know that console output can contain special icons like checkmarks? All you need to do is set the console to a TrueType font like...

You may know that each string object has a method called Trim() that trims away whitespace both from the beginning and end of a string: $text = '...

Understanding Control Flow: break, continue, return, and exit Do you know off-hand what "break", "continue", "return", and "exit" do? These are...

Get-ItemProperty can easily read registry values, but you do not get back any information about the registry value type. Get-ItemProperty -Path...

PowerShell ISE In the PowerShell console, you can pipe commands to the old-fashioned “more.com”, or better yet, to Out-Host –Paging. This will...

PowerShell 3.0 and later Sometimes it is important to know just how long a command takes. For example, to monitor web site response times, you could...

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...

All PowerShell versions Typically, NTFS permissions in the file system are inherited. You can, however, add explicit permissions to files and...

All Versions Typically, to access COM objects, these objects need to register themselves in the Windows Registry, and PowerShell needs the...