PowerShell
PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language. Initially, a Windows component only, known as Windows PowerShell, it was made open-source and cross-platform on 18 August 2016 with the introduction of PowerShell Core. The former is built on .NET Framework while the latter on .NET Core.
If you need to automate anything, PowerShell is the way to do it in Windows. It’s not always easy, but it is worth it: automation first!
Installing Ubuntu to Windows Server 2019 (WSL)
These scripts will help to install Ubuntu to a Windows Server 2019 installation. It will download Ubuntu and activate the Linux Subsystem on Windows (WSL).
Fixing “white” screen Windows 10 start search
I’ve been having some problems with the search feature of Windows 10. It suddenly stopped working. I don’t exactly know when or why, but it did not come back by turning the computer on and off again. Reinstalling Cortana worked for me.
Finetuning screen brightness with PowerShell
When I work in a low-light environment I like to have fine-grained control over the brightness of my monitor. When I change the brightness using the special function keys on my keyboard, it changes in steps of 10%! That’s a lot. PowerShell to the rescue!
Generate XML with attributes using PowerShell
Today I discovered that generating XML with PowerShell isn’t as straight forward as I had hoped. I started off with a CSV that I had to convert to XML. Fortunately PowerShell is very good when it comes to CSV. It was the parsing of the object to XML-attributes that proved the most challenging part.
PowerShell snippet: check if software is installed
Some deployment scripts need to check if certain required software is installed on a Windows Machine. You could check if the file is present at a certain location, but there is a better way to check if software is installed: the uninstall database in the Windows Registry. PowerShell makes it really easy to query the registry!
Draw .Net Core project relations with PowerShell and yUML
Having a diagram of how your C# projects interlink, can be a big help. I’ve created a small PowerShell script that will produce the diagram based on the .csproj files in a directory. It will generate Yuml.me diagrams based on the dependencies!
Create mp3 playlist with PowerShell
Playlist are a dandy way of organizing the files into one list (easy to find on your device). The m3u playlist format is a no-hassle straight forward format, that’s why I love it. It is basically a list of relative file paths. Well… if it is that simple, it should be easy to write into a PowerShell statement.
Comparing files with PowerShell
Sometimes you want to test if two files are the same. You could run MD5 or SHA hashes of the files, but it might take some time to compute them. A byte by byte comparison might be the faster instead. I’ve wrote a script doing it in PowerShell.
Regex Replacement Problem PowerShell: $1?
Madre mia! I’ve been trying to edit an HTML file using PowerShell. I only wanted to eliminate all the spans and paragraphs using regular expressions (would make sense)… and how hard can that be?
Well, it turned out to be pretty hard if you’re used to the replacement syntax of regular .Net expressions! After searching for hours I’ve discovered that $1 can’t be used in the same way as in .Net. Just use ${1}. Ouch!