Richard Siddaway's Blog

I recently showed how to generate a list of the favourites recorded on your system

http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2011/06/24/viewing-favourites.aspx

If like me you want to tidy these up from time to time it would be good not to have to search through all of them to perform the deletions using the GUI

Lets turn our previous script into an advanced function

function get-favourite{             
[CmdletBinding()]             
param()            
BEGIN{}#begin             
PROCESS{            
$favs = New-Object -ComObject Shell.Application            
Get-ChildItem -Path $favs.NameSpace(0x6).Self.Path -Recurse |            
where {-not $_.PSIsContainer} |            
foreach {            
 $fav = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{            
  Name = $_.BaseName            
  Path = $_.FullName            
 }            
             
 Get-Content -Path $_.FullName | foreach {            
  if ($_.StartsWith("URL=")) {            
   $fav | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name URL -Value $_.Replace("URL=","")}            
 }            
 $fav.PSTypeNames[0] = "Favourite"             
 $fav            
}            
            
}#process             
END{}#end            
            
<# 
.SYNOPSIS
Lists defined favourites

.DESCRIPTION
Lists favourites defined in Internet Explorer


.EXAMPLE
get-favourite

.EXAMPLE
get-favourite | where {$_.Name -like "re*"}  

.EXAMPLE
get-favourite | where {$_.Name -like "ree*"} | Remove-Item   

#>            
            
}

A few simple changes give us the required code. I’ve added the full name of the favourite as a path property. This means I can pipe straight into remove-item as shown in the third example.

I’ve also reset the output object type because I want to create a format file for this so that the path isn’t displayed by default. I will add some functions to modify and create favourites as well.

I had the pleasure of meeting Microsoft’s Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson and his charming wife at the recent PowerShell Deep Dive. As well as being very nice guy Ed also has a huge depth of knowledge on scripting in general and PowerShell in particular. His Hey, Scripting Guy! blog is one of the few I read on a regular basis. I might not always agree with Ed but he makes me think about some of the things I have come to take for granted about PowerShell.

If you don’t already read this blog now would be a good time to start – Ed is just starting a series about us stopping writing PowerShell scripts!!!  http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/06/25/don-t-write-powershell-scripts.aspx.

No, I’m not going to tell you any more – go and read it and the subscribe to the RSS feed for the rest of the posts in the series.

I’ve been having a bit of difficulty getting code highlighted code into my posts recently. I use Live Writer to publish the posts and I was using an ISEadd-in published by Lee Holmes to paste the code. This has stopped working recently. Nor sure why.

I remembered that the PowerShellPack of modules

http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/PowerShellPack

included some ISE extensions.

I loaded the module through the ISE profile and on the Add-Ons tab there is a ISEpack entry. Under the Edit menu I tried Copy-Colored but it didn’t work properly with Live Writer. However, Copy-ColoredAsHTML does work.  It just means I have to paste the code into the source view of the post and then revert to the Edit view.

Not really that more fiddly than using the paste special functionality.

I suspect that the difficulties all lie with Live Writer but at least I can paste colour (notice I spell it correctly ) highlighted code.