Dealing with Parameter Sniffing in SQL Server

Randomly Generated MAC addresses If you just need a bunch of randomly generated MAC addresses, and you don’t care much about whether these addresses are actually valid, then here is a one liner: PS> (0..5 | ForEach-Object { '{0:x}{1:x}' -f (Get-Random -Minimum 0...

Convert a binary text string into integer Here is how you convert a binary text string into the corresponding integer value: $binary = "110110110" $int = [Convert]::ToInt32($binary,2) $int Going the other way is even easier: PS> [Convert]::ToString(438,2) 110110110...

Sometimes it could be useful to load all attributes from a given AD user into a hash table. This way, you could edit them, and then use Set-ADUser with its -Add or -Replace parameters to apply them to another user account. AD User attributes Here is how you read in...

To manage users and computers in your Active Directory from PowerShell, you need the ActiveDirectory module which comes as part of the free RSAT tools from Microsoft. Using Implicit Remoting for ActiveDirectory Module Provided you are domain administrator and have...

Checking for an Element in an Array Using PowerShell If you’d like to know whether an array contains a given element, PowerShell provides the –contains operator. This operator does not support wildcards, though, so you only can check for exact matches. Using a...

LDAP filters LDAP filters are a fast and powerful way of retrieving information from Active Directory. However, LDAP filters use a very low-level date and time format. It is basically a huge integer number. Fortunately, PowerShell contains ways of converting real...

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 window. You’ll be able to maximize, minimize, hide, or show, for example. Using PowerShell 5’s Enum Capability for Show State...

When you create a PowerShell function, all parameters are positional until you start adding the “Position” attribute. Once you start to do this, all parameters with no “Position” are suddenly named and must be specified. Have a look: Example of a Classic Function...

Retrieving System Profiling Information with systeminfo.exe For ages, systeminfo.exe returned all profiling information for a computer, and could made object-oriented in Powershell – somewhat: PS C:\> $info = systeminfo.exe /FO CSV | ConvertFrom-Csv PS C:\>...

Resolving "HTTP 403" Errors in PowerShell Remoting If you use PowerShell remoting and get “HTTP 403” errors, one of the more obscure reasons for this is a proxy that interferes with your request. Excluding the Proxy to Fix the Issue It’s easy to exclude the proxy,...

PowerShell 2+ Sometimes it becomes necessary to replace special characters like German “Umlauts” in order to normalize user names or email addresses. Here is a little function that illustrates how this can be done: #requires -Version 3 function...

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 bit of .NET code, and no dependencies to the RSAT tools. As an example, here is a function that can search users by...