… never talk about PowerShell scoping rules. Judging from the posts, emails and questions we get about variable scope in PowerShell Studio forms, PowerShell scoping rules are shrouded in mystery. When you read about_scopes you get a lot of information. When you come from any other scripting language, for example VBScript, you are used to […]
Category: Ask the Experts
LOST! The forgotten features, Part II
Sometimes we get so used to how software works that we just miss if anything works differently. I am amazed to how many users I talk who have never noticed this feature in PrimalScript, even though it has been there since 2.0… In case you don’t remember, that was in the year 2000. I hope […]
Developing PowerShell scripts for other machines (Part 1)
One of the challenges you face while developing any PowerShell script is that modules that reside on your target platform are not available on your local computer. Just as an example, try installing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 modules on your 32 bit Windows XP/Vista/7/8 machine. It just won’t work. PrimalScript 2012 and SAPIEN PowerShell Studio 2012 […]
Get help for modules on other machines
When you develop scripts for other computers you don’t always have the luxury of installing the relevant modules on your own computer. In many cases they simply won’t install because you are running the wrong OS or don’t have some required server software running. Luckily the context sensitive help in PrimalScript or PowerShell Studio doesn’t […]
How to get support from SAPIEN
Once a year we need to refresh this information, so forgive us if you heard this before. Our trial software is usually not crippled in any way, so just because your are evaluating it nothing should be switched off. So if something is grayed out or inaccessible, it’s usually a configuration issue and not because […]
LOST! The forgotten features
A week ago I was hanging out with PowerShell trainer extraordinaire Jason Helmick and while we where geeking out over PowerShell tricks and software features (yes, I know, bad, isn’t it?) I asked him how he would improve file groups. (…) (crickets) (…) File groups? So I demonstrated. I learned some time ago that most […]
Introducing the PowerShell Profile Editor
PowerShell’s profiles make setting up your work environment a bit easier, allowing you to pre-load your most common snapins or modules, define functions, set variables and whatever else you need on startup. However, since there are quite a number of profiles, potentially one for each host, one for all users, one for each user, one […]
Single form or multiple dialogs?
In this installment of our series about user interface design for administrators we explore the transformation of a command line script to a Windows application. We start with a simple little script as shown below: It just prompts for a computer name on the command line, uses that information for WMI query and outputs the […]
User interface design for administrators
This post is the first in a series describing some fundamental design guidelines. Software developers usually have some kind of training in designing user interfaces or they benefit from having a specially staffed department for this task. Administrator usually don’t have the time and don’t get paid to attend UI design classes or study on […]
PSModulePath discrepancies
While investigating a bug report about ChangeVue’s installer we stumbled across a discrepancy with PowerShell’s PSModulePath environment variable. On a virgin Windows 7 machine the environment variable is set to “C:\windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules\” via a System Environment Variable.There is no default that links to the per-user module path. If you query the environment variable in CMD you […]
