Dealing with Parameter Sniffing in SQL Server

This is part 5 of our mini-series about the awesome and free “ImportExcel” PowerShell module by Doug Finke. Make sure you install the module before you play with this tip: PS> Install-Module -Name ImportExcel -Scope CurrentUser -Force Recap from Part 4: Displaying...

Checking Website Availability with a PowerShell Function In the previous example we created a small PowerShell function that checks web site availability, and as part of the test results, a HTTP response code was returned. Let’s check out how this numeric code can be...

The most widely known PowerShell hosts are certainly powershell.exe and powershell_ise.exe because they ship out-of-the-box. However, there can be many more (and hidden) PowerShell hosts running. Any software that instantiates the PowerShell engine is a PowerShell...

In the previous tip we used an old COM technique to display a pop-up box with a built-in timeout. That worked pretty well except that the dialog box can be covered under your PowerShell window at times. Keep PowerShell Dialog Boxes Always on Top With a little-known...

Why Some Web Requests Fail in PowerShell but Work in a Browser Sometimes, web requests that work fine in a browser do not seem to work well in PowerShell. For example, when you navigate to http://www.geocode.xyz/Bahnhofstrasse,Hannover?json=1 in a browser, you get...

In the previous tip we looked at the FileSystemWatcher object and how it can monitor folders for changes. To not miss any changes, however, an asynchronous approach is required which looks like this: $FileSystemWatcher = New-Object System.IO.FileSystemWatcher...

Each PowerShell host running PowerShell 5 or better opens a “named pipe” that you can detect. The code below identifies these named pipes and returns the processes exposing the pipes: Get-ChildItem -Path "\\.\pipe\" -Filter '*pshost*' | ForEach-Object { Get-Process...

Rather than calling functions recursively, you may at times want to use a Queue object that you can load with fresh tasks while you are unloading things that you have already processed. Searching a Filesystem Without Recursion Lee Holmes has recently posted the below...

Here is a PowerShell function called Lock-Screen that can lock the screen and prohibit user interaction. There can be a custom message, and the screen can be dimmed during lockout. Here is an example call: PS> Lock-Screen -LockSeconds 4 -DimScreen -Title 'Go away...

Why Encode PowerShell Code? Encoding PowerShell code is a great way to run PowerShell code outside the PowerShell environment, i.e. in batch files. Here is some sample code that takes PowerShell code, encodes it, and shows how to run it with a console command:...

Why Some Registry Keys Can't Be Deleted in PowerShell Deleting registry keys is typically trivial and can be done with Remove-Item. However, every once in a while, you may come across registry keys that can’t be deleted. In this tip we’ll show an example, and provide...

PowerShell can split large files in multiple smaller parts, for example to transfer them as email attachments. Today, we focus on splitting files. In our next tip, we show how you can join the parts back together. Splitting Large Files into Smaller Parts with...

How PowerShell Handles Mandatory Parameters When you define mandatory parameters in PowerShell, the user gets prompted for the value if it is missing. The prompt uses the parameter name only as you can see when you run this code: param ( [Parameter(Mandatory)]...

Numbers are stored internally as bytes. An Int32 value, for example, uses four bytes. Sometimes it is required to split up the number into its byte parts, for example, to calculate checksums with the least significant byte. Guide to Handling Numbers in Bytes We have...

It’s amazing how versatile PowerShell is: with just a couple of lines of code, you can turn any photo and image into a piece of ASCII art. PowerShell simply loads the image, then scans it line by line and row by row, and replaces each pixel with an ASCII character,...