It’s easy not to notice all the great things that are available for extending PowerShell. For example, here are a couple of CodePlex projects that add PSDrives to PowerShell, allowing you to treat external storage systems as if they were a file system (like you can do with the registry).

http://www.codeplex.com/PSSharePoint connects to SharePoint Portal Server 2003, http://www.codeplex.com/PSBizTalk works with …

Last month I wrote a blog entry about re-discovering DOSKey. I have to say it has been very useful and I feel much more efficient. With only a few keystrokes I can kick off programs or complex command expressions. This was easy to do since I always have a CMD window open. However, there are times when I’m in PowerShell and find myself reaching for a keyboard shortcut. While it is possible to access CMD from within Powershell, it takes too many steps. What I want is to use the same shortcut in PowerShell that I do in CMD. The solution is customizing my PowerShell profile with functions and aliases.

Well, my Ping-Computer cmdlet didn’t work. Dang. But this is a useful opportunity to cover some debugging techniques! I’ve got a lot of places where things COULD be going wrong. When I run Ping-Computer, no matter what name I provide, I get no output – no result at all. That’s bad. So, I want to change something to see what the problem is. I want to change the cmdlet so that, no matter WHAT happens, SOME output gets created. Here’s my code revision:

Okay… I got a little creative over the holidays. Anyone rememebr the old, old, text-based computer adventure game, “Collosal Caves?” Well, I’ve created a Windows PowerShell-based “homage” to that original game. It’s packaged as a PowerShell snap-in, meaning you play by running cmdlets in PowerShell. It’s in the attached ZIP file, along with instructions.

I want to stress that this …