The CodePlex guys do it again. This is a great feature that will surely help large projects garner a bit more help and support through the use of better developer documentation for getting contributors up to speed. The only thing that’s missing is syntax highlighting support for the PowerShell language. Vote for the feature here - Wiki Syntax Highlighting for PowerShell

You’ll need a CodePlex account for this I think. More information on the July 22nd release:

Syntax highlighting has been added to project wiki pages. See the Wiki Markup Guide for details.
Also added is mailing list support for project discussions: start or respond to a discussion from your e-mail client; get notifications of new responses as they come in, or in daily digest format. Now users can subscribe to an entire project’s discussions, including all new discussions posted to the project. See Mailing Lists Documentation for more information.
Feature requests addressed in this release:
Syntax Highlighting Extension
Feature request: Mailing lists
Issues addressed in this release:
HTTPS should be dropped
HTTPS in forums causes browser warnings
Feature request: please let me input ENTER in release description textbox
Pressing enter while in textarea submits form

In the latest PowerShellCX changeset, archive read and extract support is finally available. Sorry there are no binary builds yet. Use the Extract-Archive cmdlet as a stand-alone to extract all files. Use Read-Archive to generate ArchiveEntry objects which can be piped through Where-Object for filtering and eventual consumption by Extract-Archive (which can accept ArchiveEntry as well as FileInfo pipeline input). I’ve got progress reporting working too for extract. I’ve added support for reading/extracting SevenZip, Arj, BZip2, Cab, Chm, Cpio, Deb, GZip, Iso, Lzh, Lzma, Nsis, Rar, Rpm, Tar, Wim, Z & Zip.  Yes, you did see ISO support in that list Write support is only zip, bzip2, tar and gzip still.

There are more features coming, including encrypted archive support.

I just hacked this one up a few minutes ago to let me get an Oracle, Access, Excel/CSV or SQL Server database connection quickly without fiddling with provider strings and other things that just fall out of my head as fast as they get put in. It uses an old trick of creating a zero-length file with an UDL extension and then executing it. The function returns an operable OleDbConnection object, albeit a closed one unless you specifiy –Open as a switch.

You’ll notice I said OleDbConnection. This means you should pick an OLEDB provider on the provider page for best (read: working) results. Cancelling returns nothing.

Ah, how I love the little blue box of typographical terrific-ness.

Why do such a thing? Well, if you’ve created your own aliases for commands and you try to give someone your ps1 script file, it will not run because they have not got the same aliases defined as you. Also, scripts that use fully-resolved names like “Get-ChildItem” are more readable for a newcomer to PowerShell than one that is using the unix-like “ls" alias for example. "Get-ChildItem" leads quite directly to the MSDN documentation, but "ls" might lead you anywhere. Before you publish a script online somewhere for the world to use, it’s important that you try to remove any aliases and replace them with the native command names.

Doing this kind of thing has been talked about before but it was always a very difficult thing to do with PowerShell v1.0, what with the lack of BNF documentation describing the grammar etc. Thankfully, it's a lot easier to do with PowerShell v2.0 (currently at release CTP2) because the team has exposed the Tokenizer for use in scripts. There's been suprisingly little use of it so far, so I figured I'd start the ball rolling with a series of articles based around it. So, let's look at an example script that uses aliases and put it through the meat grinder:

As you can see, it spits out the expanded script to the output stream. The informational messages are written to the host, so they won't interfere if you redirect the output to a file like: .\resolve-aliases.ps1 in.ps1 > out.ps1

Here's the Resolve-Aliases.ps1 script itself:

Of course, this requires PowerShell v2.0 CTP2. Next in the series, I'll give you a script to check your ps1 scripts for backwards compatibility against PowerShell 1.0. That should be handy for those naughty admins out there who despite all the warnings have installed v2 in production.

Someone on a private mailing list I'm on lamented the problem with powershell's '>' redirection operator defaulting inflexibly to use unicode for encoding the output file. This is not very compatible for NT's ancient console subsystem which works best with ASCII data. Fortunately, there's an easy workaround to fix this:

Due to the magic of command discovery and the fact that > really does use out-file, you can "fix" this by placing the following in your $profile:

function out-file($FilePath, $Encoding, [switch]$Append) {
$input | microsoft.powershell.utility\out-file $filepath -encoding ascii `
     -append:$append
}

From now on, > will be forced to use ASCII encoding. This works because functions have higher precedence than built-in commands in powershell's command discovery search.

UPDATE: Rather annoyingly, I'm informed that this particular workaround doesn't work on v1.0 of PowerShell. I tested the above on v2.0CTP2 only. Doh.

Just another quick-fix post for any readers’ benefit. I have been using MOSS on Windows 2008 Server on VMWare for a while now and the display has always been sluggish and choppy even though VMWare tools is up-to-date and installed. I decided to take a quick peek at the display properties to see if perhaps hardware acceleration is off or something like that and I noticed that the display driver was “Standard VGA Display.” I thought to myself, “Shouldn’t that be a VMWare display driver?” so I clicked properties and drilled down to the “Update Driver…” dialog. Clickety-click and hey presto, it finds a newer driver, namely “VMWare SVGA II” and installs it. Display is now much better. On other guest OS’s like Win 2003 etc, VMWare tools installation updated the driver for you, but this time it didn’t. Not sure why.

One remaining problem I have is that the mouse is dodgy and sometimes the host mouse pointer gets de-synced with the guest’s. Anyone got that problem?  Fixed by starting device manager and going through nearly the same drill as the display driver. I manually chose “VMWare Pointing Device” and rebooted, replacing the default ps/2 mouse driver.

Update:

After I rebooted, it was still a little sluggish. Then I remembered that by default, hardware acceleration is only at one notch up. So, push it up to full!

MoW poked at me, so I guess I can’t let the crazy dutchman down:

How old were you when you started using computers?

10 or 11

What was your first machine?

An Amstrad CPC 464 with Green screen.

What was the first real script you wrote?

I vaguely remember being delighted at having a rocket (Chr$(239)) ascend the Amstrad’s screen when I figured out that STEP –1 was the key in getting a for/next loop to count backwards.

What languages have you used?

• Powershell, VBScript, JavaScript, Tcl, Perl, Batch/4NT
• Z80A, 8088/8086 (NECv20/v30) assembler
• Basic, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, C++, Java, C#, VB.NET

I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to development. The list above is just what I can remember

What was your first professional Sysadmin Developer gig?

After helping out a friend’s dad put together a training course for Visual Basic 3.0, I then managed to blag a job coding Ireland’s first ever major e-commerce site using MS Merchant Server 1.0 (which predated ASP 1.0) for a leading ISP.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started in IT?

I might have started a little bit earlier even!

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new Sysadmins (or Devs), what would it be?

Just one thing? Learn Regular Expressions as it will pay you back ten-fold for whatever time you put into it.

What is the most fun you have had scripting?

There’s only one answer here: writing extensions for PowerShell.

This particular branch of the meme ends here as I don’t think I can tag anyone who hasn’t been tagged already.

Just a quick one for the frustrated searchers out there. If you've recently installed the SP1 beta for Visual Studio 2008 (or just the 3.5 sp1 beta alone), and you find that you have serious difficulty using SharePoint Designer 2007 against a remote instance of SharePoint running in a VM (or a physical machine) that doesn't have the SP1 Beta bits, you know what to do. My SPD would refuse to load the master page from my virtualized SharePoint instance until I had installed .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta onto the virtual machine also. Just so you know!

In the spirit of "tidying things up," and pushing out nearly-there projects, I turned my attention to http://www.codeplex.com/PSMobile. I have my fingers in way too many pies I think and I'm just not finding enough time to get things finished off - but enough is enough. I am trying to clear my plate, and this is fruit number #2 of that attempt at self-correction. I have some other important out of band work that I need to complete, but I find I cannot concentrate on that until these personal projects that have been niggling me for ages are dealt with. Anyway, lets dispel a couple of questions with a screenshot:

Requirements

• ActiveSync 4.2 or higher (or Windows Mobile Device Centre 6.0+ on Vista) Download
• A Windows Mobile device (PocketPC/SmartPhone 2002, 2003, 2003SE, Windows Mobile 5, 6 or 6.1)
• Windows PowerShell 1.0 or 2.0 (CTP) Download

Features

• Copy, Move, Delete items between folders on your device (including Storage Card) with standard PowerShell Cmdlets
• Move/Copy files to/from your device and your desktop with ConvertTo-WMFile and ConvertFrom-WMFile
• Get device information and manipulate and explore the registry with a rich device object returned from Get-WMDevice
• Invoke-Item against remote items to or execute or trigger their associated applications
• Invoke-Item with -Local switch to attempt to execute a remote file in the context of your local desktop (e.g. office docs or images/videos)
• New "Mode" attributes specific to Windows Mobile file attributes: (I)nRom, Rom(M)odule
• File/Folder objects' attributes can be modified with .Attributes properties just like FileInfos etc.
• Tab completion with MoW's PowerTab Download

File Manipulation

A picture's worth a thousand words.

Cmdlets and Definitions

Here's a table of the syntax for the included Cmdlets.

* These Cmdlets that accept a path will bind to pipeline input via PSPath property name.

If you've got any problems, suggestions or ideas, please post into the discussions board on the web site. Have fun!

I took a few hours yesterday to "tidy up my room" so to speak, so I built a nice MSI installer, updated the help, CodePlex Wiki and examples and closed all bugs. This is probably the final release now that PowerShell 2.0 CTP2 has introduced support for eventing, so thanks for all the support.

New Features

• Multiple named queue support and default queue with -QueueName parameter
• Better COM support, window message pumping etc.
• NoFlush / Peek parameter support for queue reading
• Get-EventQueue command added for viewing queues and their message counts.

Cmdlet Name Changes

• Get-Event -> Read-Event
• Connect-EventListener -> Connect-Event
• Disconnect-EventListener -> Disconnect-Event

Additionally, several niggling bugs closed (including the one where read-event -wait would return immediately with no events).

http://www.codeplex.com/pseventing

For an advanced example: Foreground / Background Swappable Downloads In PowerShell.