PowerShell Tools and Books That I Use (Revisited)

A friend of mine found this blog yesterday and commented on “PowerShellToolsandBooksThatIUse“. I thought that it would be good to update the list since it’s almost 2 years old.  The changes are mostly incremental: version changes, a few new items, a few I don’t use much anymore. Without further ado, here we go (now with …

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A few functions for working with SQL Agent Job data

If you’ve ever looked at sysjobhistory, you know that the way SQL Server stores datetimes and durations in this table are not very friendly. Well, that’s not quite true. They are human-readable if they are small, but if you’ve got a job that runs for hours (days?), it becomes more and more difficult. For example, …

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My new favorite cmdlet: set-strictmode

If you’ve ever written Visual Basic or VB.Net code, you’re aware that it’s highly recommended that you use “Option Strict” in all of your code.  Similarly, Perl scripters have a “use strict” that comes highly suggested. The idea of these options is that there’s quite a bit of flexibility built into these languages, and sometimes …

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The Identity Function

In mathematics, an identity function is a function that returns the arguments that are passed to it unchanged.  While the concept of an identity function is quite often useful in formulating proofs, it is not something that I ever expected to use in a programming environment.   Here’s the identity function written in PowerShell: The surprising …

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New Versions of PowerShell Community Extensions (PSCX) and SQL PowerShell Extensions (SQLPSX)

In case you haven’t heard, the PowerShell Community Exetensions (PSCX) and SQL PowerShell Extensions (SQLPSX) projects have both recently released version 2.0 (and each followed shortly after with quick bug fixes). Both 2.0 releases are module-based and include advanced functions to solve lots of frequently encountered problems. If you haven’t ever used these toolsets, I …

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