I just learned something cool new in PowerShell: that you can generate ranges with the “..” operator.
This works even in the old Windows PowerShell.
This is especially cool when you want to repeat a command a certain number of times in a loop.
Using the IIS Manager you can generate self-signed certificates for HTTPS bindings. The certificates generated by the IIS Manager have the limitation that the common name (CN) of the certificate is always the computer name.
If you wish to set an own common name for the certificate, you can use following command in PowerShell (open as administrator) to generate a new self-signed certificate.
New-SelfSignedCertificate -DnsName "my.customdomain.com" -FriendlyName "MyServiceName" -NotAfter (Get-Date).AddYears(10)
Here’s a small but very useful PowerShell script to generate GUIDs in different formats.
You can use this method with PowerShell as alternative to the tail command at Linux.
When using PowerShell, did you ever wish to have a function to pipe structured data to visualize it.
PowerShell has a great built-in function for that: Out-GridView.
You can even filter the rows in the grid.
If you want PowerShell to wait for an action to complete, you can display a loading spinner using these few lines of code.
The script will print a new dot every three seconds until the condition in the until-clause is fulfilled.
The result looks like this:
You can use the command line program clip to pipe the output of a command to your clipboard.
Write-Output "Hello World!" | clip
There’s no command line tool on Windows like Grep on Linux to search for a specific text in all files recursively. But there’s a simple alternative.
Bash
grep -r "peter" *
PowerShell
ls * -r | sls "peter"
Invoke-SqlCmd ist a great cmdlet for PowerShell for querying SQL databases. But sometimes you don’t want to install the extra requirement SQL Server Management Objects on the server.
Invoke-SqlCmd -ServerInstance $Server -Database $Database -Query "SELECT * FROM Staff"
There’s an simple alternative. Use the .NET classes in the System.Data.SqlClient namespace which are available on every computer which has the .NET framework installed.
function SqlQuery($server, $database, $query)
{
$connection = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection
$connection.ConnectionString = "Server=$server;Database=$database;Integrated Security=True;"
$connection.Open()
$command = $connection.CreateCommand()
$command.CommandText = $query
$result = $command.ExecuteReader()
$table = new-object “System.Data.DataTable”
$table.Load($result)
$connection.Close()
return $table
}
SqlQuery $Server $Database "SELECT * FROM Staff"