Dealing with Parameter Sniffing in SQL Server

Extracting the Integer Part of a Division Result When you divide numbers and just want the decimals before the decimal point, you could cast the result to integer. However, this would also round the result: PS> 18 / 5 3.6 PS> [Int](18/5) 4 Removing Decimals...

Removing multiple white spaces from text is easy in PowerShell. -replace operator Simply use -replace operator and look for whitespaces ("\s") that occur one or more time ("+"), then replace them all with just one whitespace: PS> '[ Man, it works! ]' -replace...

Send Emails with PowerShell Using Send-MailMessage PowerShell has built-in support for sending emails: Send-MailMessage! All you need is an SMTP server. However, with standard encoding you may run into issues where special characters are mangled. -Encoding parameter...

Reading Text Files and Skipping Blank Lines To read in a text file and skip blank lines, try this: $file = 'c:\sometextfile.txt' Get-Content $file | Where-Object { $_.Trim() -ne '' } It will omit empty lines, lines with only blanks and lines with only tabs. ReTweet...

Set the default value for a registry key If you need to set the default value for a registry key, you can use either of these approaches: Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:\Software\Somekey -Name ‘(Default)’ -Value MyValue Or, you can just do this: Set-Item -Path...

Scraping Website Data with PowerShell To scrape valuable information from websites with PowerShell you can download the HTML code and then use regular expressions to extract what you are after. That's not hard. Here is a sample: $webclient = New-Object...

PowerShell hash tables PowerShell hash tables are, by default, not case sensitive: PS > $hash = @{} PS > $hash.Key = 1 PS > $hash.keY = 2 PS > $hash.KEY 2 Creating Case-Sensitive Hash Tables in PowerShell If you need case-sensitive keys, you can create the...

Dealing with 32-bit Dependencies in a 64-bit Environment If you are using code that can only run in a 32-bit environment (i.e. using old database drivers or COM objects), here is a solution that will re-launch the script in a 32-bit PowerShell when it is launched in a...

When working remotely in a peer-to-peer or cross-domain scenario, you will have to add all the computers you'd like to communicate with into the trusted hosts list. Overwriting Issue When Adding Trusted Hosts Unfortunately, when you try this, any new entry will...

Identifying a Process by Window Title It isn't always easy to pick the right process because the process ID or process name may not be known or ambiguous. If the process has a window and you can see the window title, all you need to do is search for a keyword in that...

Understanding the Limitation of Hash Tables Compared to Switch Statements In the previous tip, you used a hash table to translate input values. However, unlike Switch-statements, Hash Tables have no "default" so all values need to be present in the hash table. Check...

Did you notice that Dir, ls or Get-ChildItem do not return hidden files? Use the -Force Parameter to Reveal Hidden Files To see hidden files, you need to specify the -force parameter: Dir $env:windir -force Filter to Show Only Hidden Files But what if you just wanted...

Sometimes, you may have an existing VBScript that already does just what you want. You can easily incorporate any VBScript into PowerShell because PowerShell can call just about anything that is executable, including VBScript. The tricky part is that you mainly want...

In a previous tip, you learned how to call PowerShell statements and read their return value. Return values are somewhat limited because they can only be numeric. There is an easy way to do this if you'd like to read more structured information from a PowerShell call...

Why Hide PowerShell Script Code? Sometimes, you may want to hide the code of your PowerShell script in order to protect passwords contained within the code. One way to safely encrypt PowerShell script is by converting it into a secure string. You must first create a...