Problem scenario:
You have a PowerShell script that launches a pop-up window.  This pop-up appears behind the PowerShell ISE GUI.  Without being in the foreground, the users of this script fail to realize there is a prompt waiting for the user to take action.  You want the pop-up window to be in the front.  You tried things like these options to no avail:

• New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Form -Property @{TopMost = $true}
• -ArgumentList([System.Diagnostics.Process]::GetCurrentProcess().MainWindowHandle)
• form.TopMost = “True”
• form.TopMost = $true
• form.TopMost = $True
• $form.TopLevel = $true
• set-foregroundWindow(Get-Process PowerShell).Main.WindowHandle
• $form.BringToFront()
• set-WindowsFocus
• [void]$showWindowAsync::ShowWindowAsync((Get-Process -id $pid).MainWindowHandle,

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Continue reading “How Do You Ensure That a PowerShell Pop-Up Window (mini-GUI) Always Appears in the Front?”

Problem Scenario
You are writing a PowerShell script.  You want to extract one value from the results of a command.  You get a set of values all on one line.  It is difficult to parse just what you need. The output values for each attribute are separated by spaces.  Sometimes the output values are blank.  You want to reliably extract one property value from the command. You know that piping the output to an “sls” command will retrieve an entire row. 

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Continue reading “How Do You Print One Attribute (or Element) From The Results of a Built-in PowerShell Command?”

Problem scenario:  Whenever you use PowerShell to append to the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file you get spaces before and after every character of every string.  The problem does not happen with ordinary text files.

To illustrate, here is a line of PowerShell code and take not of the destination flat file involved:
echo “8.8.8.8        continualintegration.com” >> c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

The above code results in a line like this inside the file:
8 .

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Continue reading “How do you update the hosts file on a Windows server with PowerShell?”

Problem scenario:  Sometimes variables get values you do not expect.  Handling these exceptions is the mark of a good programmer.  

A PowerShell variable (e.g., $contint) may have the following content:
“

second line
third line”

When a variable’s value can span lines, conditional tests act unpredictably when they use such a variable.  For example a conditional test of the variable like this 

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Continue reading “How Do You Use Conditional Logic on PowerShell Variables To Test If They Are Empty When The Variable’s Value Can Span Two Or More Lines?”

Question:  In PowerShell, how do you convert an array value into an integer value?

Answer:  Assuming that the value is an integer (e.g., not value that is legal for an array but not an integer), do the following:

1.  Write the array value to a file.
2.  Use the key word trim to eliminate blank space or other characters that would not be supported by the integer data type.

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Continue reading “In PowerShell, how do you convert an array value into an integer value?”