Richard Siddaway's Blog

We are trying to raise the money to purchase equipment to record the sessions at future PowerShell Summit’s http://powershell.org/wp/2014/04/28/help-us-record-the-powershell-summit-sessions/   If you can help us – please do.   There have been some amazing sessions this year – when you watch people’s jaws drop you know the content is great. If we can record the […]

Back in this post http://richardspowershellblog.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/powershell-3-and-word/ I showed that this code $word = New-Object -ComObject "Word.application"            $word.visible = $true            $doc = $word.Documents.Add()            $doc.Activate()                        $word.Selection.Font.Name = "Cambria"            $word.Selection.Font.Size = "20"            $word.Selection.TypeText("PowerShell")            $word.Selection.TypeParagraph()                        $word.Selection.Font.Name = "Calibri"            $word.Selection.Font.Size = "12"            $word.Selection.TypeText("The best scripting language in the world!")            $word.Selection.TypeParagraph()                        $file = "c:\test1.doc"            $doc.SaveAs([REF]$file)                        $Word.Quit() Wouldn’t work […]

Day one of the Summit has been and gone and it has lived up to expectations. With more attendees and more sessions than last year this is the place to be if you want your PowerShell questions answered. One of the highlights of day 1 was Steve Muraski’s sessions on DSC. He has recorded them […]

Off to the PowerShell Summit tomorrow morning – 3 days of wall to wall PowerShell with some of the most knowledgeable people in the world.  Its going to be fun.   More details of the European Summit will be coming soon – remember its 20 September – 1 October in Amsterdam

Windows Server can be installed in two ways – full fat GUI or Server Core.  The latter is Windows without Windows.  The GUI components are stripped off and you’re just left with the core components.  This results in a smaller server – I’ve got 2 machines running in my Hyper-V test environment. Both are set […]

Sounds a bit like an old time role playing game but is actually a useful piece of knowledge. You can define a subnet mask in 2 ways. Either use  the full mask e.g. 255.255.248.0  or define the number of bits in the mask  e.gg 21 which is known as the prefixlength in the PowerShell networking […]

WMI is a great tool for managing your Windows machines – I’d argue that PowerShell wouldn’t be as powerful as it is without WMI. If you question that remember that 60% of the additional cmdlets in Windows Server 2012 & 2012 R2 are CDXML based i.e. publish a WMI class as  a PowerShell module. PowerShell […]

I’ve been using the CIM cmdlets for a number of posts recently and had a comment that a reader got a message that Get-CimInstance didn’t exist on their Windows 7 machine.  Windows 7 ships with PowerShell 2.0; Windows 8 with PowerShell 3.0 and Windows 8.1 with PowerShell 4.0. You need PowerShell 3.0 or 4.0 to […]

You can also use the SoftwareLicensingProduct CIM class to test the status of your Office products. Get-CimInstance -ClassName SoftwareLicensingProduct -Filter "Name LIKE ‘Office%’" | where PartialProductKey | select Name, ApplicationId, LicenseStatus You need to be careful with Office as you might find a lot more options than you expected. On my machine I found this: […]

I’m building some virtual machines for my demo’s at the upcoming PowerShell summit.  To make the demo’s, and setup, more interesting(?) I decided to use some Server Core instances. The usual setup activities become a bit more interesting with Server Core – particular Windows activation.  Windows 2012 R2 will activate itself if the new machine […]