Scripting

This article explains how to set up a Twitter bot in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. It provides an easy way to efficiently schedule a large number of tweets in a consistent format.

How to centrally manage essential security settings of self-managed devices This is a guest post by Martin Kretzschmar, customer success engineer at vast limits, the uberAgent company. One thing I especially like about my everyday working life is the flexibility it offers. I appreciate the freedom of choice in terms of location, time and device. We want to avoid getting into micro-management but, being an IT company, we also need to provide the necessary security where needed.

There is more than one way to test the performance of web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or IE, but regardless of how you do it, you need a consistent workload that makes the browsers comparable. Unless you are testing with synthetic benchmarks (which come with a plethora of problems of their own) you need a way to automate browsers opening tabs and loading URLs. This article presents a simple solution to do just that.

PowerShell is a popular and extremely versatile tool, but is it a good idea to use PowerShell in logon scripts? Let’s try to find out! Setting the Stage I am going to compare the resource utilization of the following languages frequently used with logon scripts:

As I found out the (excellent) Egnyte Desktop Sync client for Windows ignores directories that have the system attribute set. For some reason some of the directories I wanted to sync did have this attribute set. Getting rid of the system attribute on (many) directories is harder than it seems.

As with any other product, when working with Gmail you sometimes get to a point where you want something the product simply does not provide. When that happens, a scripting interface can be a lifesaver. Let’s see how we can put Google Apps Script to use.

When you need to simulate a real Active Directory with thousands of users you quickly find that creating realistic test accounts is not trivial. Sure enough, you can whip up a quick PowerShell one-liner that creates any number of accounts, but what if you need real first and last names? Real (existing) addresses? Postal codes matching phone area codes? I could go on. The point is that you need two things: input files with names, addresses etc. And script logic that creates user accounts from that data. This blog post provides both.

My recent post about things I dislike about PowerShell provoked some interesting reactions (see the comments). Several readers argued that PowerShell is not supposed to be a full-blown programming language but a kind of super-advanced shell scripting tool.

With all the love PowerShell is getting these days one might think that the golden age of (Windows) scripting has finally begun. Maybe it has. But one man’s nirvana can be another man’s hell.

When you have a cloud-based file sharing service it makes a lot of sense to synchronize part or all of the data with your desktop computer. Citrix ShareFile offers the Sync for Windows tool for that purpose. However, once you open its configuration screen you notice that has a severe restriction: it can only synchronize to a single local folder. In many cases it would make much more sense to synchronize different cloud folders to different locations on your hard disk. When I complained to the product manager Peter Schulz about this I learned about a hidden gem: the single folder restriction is only present in the UI; the underlying sync engine is much more flexible. And the best thing is: the sync engine can be configured from PowerShell. Here is how.

When you use XenDesktop the only way it makes sense you may find that Citrix has not really put much effort into making that a smooth experience. Persistent is a Second-Grade Citizen XenDesktop is really designed to be used with pooled desktops - machines that are reset to a pristine state when the user logs off. Of course, stateless desktops are much better (and, importantly, cheaper) served from XenApp. This has been the topic of many a debate which I will not repeat here. But I will state that if you give a so-called knowledge worker a personal desktop, you better make sure that desktop is persistent.

Cleanly shutting down all virtual machines on a given set of hosts is not as trivial as it might seem - especially if you want to be able to restore the original state once the planned maintenance you are doing this for is completed.

There are situations when you have VMs on disk, but vCenter does not know about them - i.e. they are not in the inventory. While it is fairly easy to add a single machine to the inventory, doing so for dozens or hundreds or VMs is too tedious to do manually. This script automates the process.

On my quest for a decent PowerShell development tool I first tried out PowerGUI, but was not very happy with it. When the RTM version of PowerShell 3.0 along with a revamped ISE was released a few days ago, I decided to give it a try. Here is what I found.

In order to perform a specific test of my new application SetACL Studio I needed a string with a length of exactly 32,739 bytes.

Attending the community conference PubForum E2E Conference has many benefits, the biggest is in my opinion getting to know many very talented and very nice people. One of them, Ton de Vreede, recently sent me a PowerShell script he had written which I am happy to publish here.

Determining day, month and year on the command line is surprisingly difficult if the solution is to work across locales, i.e. on international systems with different regional settings. Although we can use the variables %DATE% and %TIME% their contents is specific to the locale. If set to German, the date is displayed in the format dd.MM.yyyy, if set to English (United States), the date format is M/d/yyyy.

Sometimes you need a list of all the files and/or folders in a directory with their full path, without any additional information. “DIR /B” would be the right command, if it only printed out the full path (it does that only if combined with the recursion parameter /S).

When you are publishing PowerShell code on the web, you soon discover that it looks much nicer with syntax highlighting - as did I. There are several ways to add syntax highlighting to your blog or web site, most of which rely on external (Wordpress) plugins or JavaScript on the page. I do not like that approach too much. I prefer to have the syntax highlighting embedded in the HTML code. That way I have full control over the appearance (and the highlighting also works in the RSS feed). The logical solution is to use a script that embeds HTML coloring tags directly into the script.

This article describes how to list all installed MSI packages. A more comprehensive listing of all applications displayed in Programs and Features can be obtained through our monitoring and analytics product uberAgent.

Update 2010-04-20: Thanks to Stefan Henseler the script now works correctly with multiple dependencies in a single file. Be sure to download the current version below. App-V’s Dynamic Suite Composition is a powerful feature in that it allows multiple “bubbles” to share the same virtual environment. In other words, package A can be made dependent on package B. But if DSC is used extensively, dependencies between packages tend to become difficult to manage - there seems to be no simple way of listing all packages’ dependencies. Well, I have written a PowerShell script that does just that.

There are many ways to determine when Windows was installed. Here are some of them. Systeminfo The systeminfo tool displays a lot of interesting information about the computer and the operating system, among them the installation date. Here is some sample output:

What is the best way to learn PowerShell? Never use cmd.exe again! With PowerShell 2.0 on my Windows 7 machine I decided it finally is time to polish my rusty knowledge of the language dating back to the days when PowerShell was still called Monad. In my attempt to re-familiarize myself with PoSh I consciously use it for tasks that would take me mere seconds with other tools like cmd.exe, or even old friends like Perl. But, hey, learning takes time, and there is nothing better than practice! Here are a couple of things I have learned en route.

The Windows command line is a powerful beast. It can be made to do things one would never have thought possible, but it can be very tricky indeed to find out just how to make it jump through a particular hoop.