Oct 27, 2016

For quite some time now I have been posting a number of blogs around the theme of “PowerShell Basics…” as I believe that it is now critical that any IT professional engaged in any form of Microsoft/Windows infrastructure platform support needs to understand at least the basic syntax and usage of PowerShell. After all, PowerShell has been the underpinning structure of ALL management utilities since Server 2008 was released, and now that Microsoft has thrown PowerShell open source, not only do you have PowerShell on the Windows platforms, but right now you can also download PowerShell packages from Microsoft for the 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 14.04, CentOS 7, Red Hat Linux 7 and even Mac OS X 10.11 !

Now these blogs started out as quick one-off’s to highlight the important points and gotcha’s encountered in the initial PowerShell courses, but over time these blogs have grown quite dramatically to include all sorts of tips and tricks and become very popular and valuable value added resources in virtually every technical course we run here at New Horizons, from server and desktop related courses, through the Hyper-V, Exchange, SQL, System Center and SharePoint courses and now up to the cloud with our Azure, Intune and Office 365 courses etc.

Anyway, I though it is about time that we paused a moment to provide a one stop list of my PowerShell blogs for your edification and education! I have listed them in a very rough release date order, as a lot of the earlier blogs did not even have “PowerShell Basics…” in their title.

Blog: Quoting in PowerShell for newbies
Description: Pointing out the differences between single and double quotes in PowerShell.

Blog: Get-Help – The PowerShell Way
Description: Looking at the Get-Help, and the Get-Command cmdlets, accessing the Help About text files and Aliases, as well a brief introduction to PowerShell profiles and the Tab completion (Intellisense in ISE) features of PowerShell.

Blog: PowerShell’s Remote Control in a Nutshell
Description: Looks at various ways PowerShell can be used to connect to and manage remote PC’s.

Blog: Passwords and alternative credentials in PowerShell
Description: Looks at how PowerShell uses and encrypts passwords, and ways of using credentials in your PowerShell scripts.

Blog: New Hyper-V cmdlets in PowerShell 4.0
Description: Looking at some of the more overlooked cmdlets in PowerShell to manage your Hyper-V environment and your VM’s.

Blog: Introducing PowerShell for Office 365!
Description: Looks at Microsoft website dedicated to all things PowerShell for Office 365 related.

Blog: PowerShell Profiles – Have it Your Way
Description: Looks at the 8 possible PowerShell profiles available to us, how to access them and some security guidelines.

Blog: PowerShell Profiles – Have it Your Way (Part 2)
Description: Looks at some of the cmdlets commonly used in PowerShell profiles, what PSDrives and PSProviders are and how PowerShell can run your most common command line tools such as IPConfig etc.

Blog: More PowerShell Constructs and Loop Management
Description: Looks at the Do, the While and the For constructs in PowerShell, as well as the Break and the Continue Statements.

Blog: PowerShell Basics Series – Sorting and Selecting
Description: Tips and tricks on using the Sort-Object and Select-Object PowerShell cmdlets, as well as the very useful Get-Member cmdlet.

Blog: PowerShell Basics Series – Measuring Objects (Part 1)
Description: Looks at the Measure-Object cmdlet to do counting, averaging, summing and retrieve minimum and maximum values of specified objects etc, and tips and tricks on how to use the Get-WMIObject cmdlet to query various machines WMI repositories.

Blog: PowerShell Basics Series – Measuring Objects (Part 2)
Description: Some additional uses of the Measure-Object cmdlet, and a neat trick in accessing the properties of objects or arrays.

Blog: PowerShell Basics Series –Manipulating Strings
Description: Looking at the properties and methods etc. of objects in PowerShell with the Get-Member cmdlet and tips and tricks on manipulating string values.

Blog: PowerShell Basics Series – Date and Time Manipulations
Description: How to access/include date and time values and include them in out log file outputs etc. using PowerShell cmdlets such as Get-Date, the Get-CimInstance and Get-WmiObject. (and a big gotcha with calculating Date intervals).

Blog: PowerShell Basics Series – PowerShell Pipelining
Description: How does the PowerShell pipelining feature work? How can I change the output to say a text file or HTML or CSV file format or even a simple Boolean True or False output etc.

O.K so there are a few blogs to get you started in your PowerShell journey so please check them out – I hope you find PowerShell as exciting and useful and indeed vital as I do for all sorts of tasks and automation functions – without having to be a developer! Check out all our New Horizons technical courses, they pretty much all now have PowerShell cmdlets in them, and if you really want to become familiar with PowerShell, check out our dedicated PowerShell courses. And who knows, I shall probably be adding other blog titbits on PowerShell in the future so stay tuned!