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!

PowerShell, Windows

Resetting the terminal colors on Windows

I have no idea how I came to this point, but the yellow colors in my terminal (both cmd and PowerShell) are not bright yellow anymore. So I want to reset my colors back to the old values! Turns out that getting them back is not as straightforward as I had hoped…

Automation, bash, PowerShell, Windows, WSL

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).

Automation, PowerShell

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.

PowerShell, Windows

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!

PowerShell

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.

Automation, PowerShell, Windows

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!

.NET Core / C#, PowerShell

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!

PowerShell

Generate M3U Playlist with PowerShell

MP3s are everywhere and back in 2014 I finally had a phone with enough storage to store a decent amount of them. I use MediaMonkey to add high resolution album covers and to rename the files in a predictable format: Artist – Album – # – Title. The only thing I was missing was a simple way of creating a M3U playlist: PowerShell to the rescue!

PowerShell, Windows

Compare Files with PowerShell: a faster way

Sometimes you need to test if two files are the same. As files are getting larger, your scripts will take longer, so we need to look into performance. In this article, I’ll show how to compare two files using a buffered approach in PowerShell.

.NET / C#, PowerShell, Regular Expressions

Regular Expression Groups in PowerShell (for .NET people)

PowerShell is very similar to .NET, so it is no surprise that it is very popular with .NET developers. It is a language for writing scripts, so you might encounter some unexpected situations. I had this experience when I tried to parse some HTML with PowerShell: I could not get the replacement with regular expression groups to work! It turned out that my .NET knowledge was working against me…