PowerShell 009 - Get-Help -ShowWindow

Help... huh... what is it good for?

The help system in PowerShell is one of the features that makes the new shell so accessible. Once you get used to the system you ask PowerShell questions and it gives you answers. You ask it to clarify, and it does. You ask for more details, it gives you more details. You ask for examples, it gives you examples. It is really, really great.

I was working through some best practices by some of the PowerShell MVPs and I was finding some sample scripts and advanced functions on TechNet and realized that often times writing good help is skipped.

I'm optimistic that the amount of help content I consume will burn into my brain the value of taking the time to write good help content.

-ShowWindow

You can write the help content to the screen and read it from the console. You could even send it right out to a printer, but don't! ("I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues" - The Lorax) Sending the help content to the console window is great. When working quickly I often will simply look at examples to get me started;

PS> Get-Help Get-CimInstance -Examples

If I want to see all of the content in the console window;

PS> Get-Help Get-CimInstance -Full

Great. Quick, moves the ball forward nicely. But when learning the subtleties of cmdlets there is often an extensive amount of content to go through. PowerShell's ISE provides a way to throw the content into a single window. It also provides some very interesting features to assist. To get the full content in a separate window type;

PS> Get-Help Get-CimInstance -ShowWindow

Your help content is now in a separate windows. Makes research and troubleshooting much easier in my opinion.

My poor eyes! The text is small, my reading glasses are in the other room, my backup reading glasses are in the couch cushions and my backup, backup reading glasses are who knows! But look... in the bottom right hand of the screen there is a slider bar that allows you to magnify the text... nice! Thanks Microsoft! (you can also <CTRL> & + to increase the font size)

Narrow It Down

OK, now there is a lot of content. How do I find what I am looking for. Get-CimInstance (the cmdlet I chose for the example) seems pretty confusing. The first thing I see is syntax. Lots of syntax. There are almost 10 parameter sets to deal with. Seems to be lots of parameters. I'm betting there are lots of examples.

Right at the top left side of the screen you will see a 'Find:' feature. Simply type in the word or phrase you are looking for and let PowerShell (well the ISE) help you.

In the upper right you will find a button called 'Settings'. Click this button and select only the 'type' of content you want displayed in the window.

It is all pretty self-explanatory. Make sure you spend time here. I have surely heard this message from the PowerShell gurus out there and taken it to heart. Another lesson I'm learning the more I develop scripts and tools with PowerShell is the importance of formatting... but that is a discussion for a different day.

PowerShell 008 - $Profile

$Profile - what is it good for?

There are many things you can use the profile for in PowerShell. The variable $profile stores the path to the profile loaded when you launch the console or the ISE.

 

 

If you notice the path above you will see the script is called 'Microsoft.PowerShellISE_Profile.ps1'. It is a profile script that will load when you launch the ISE. I almost exclusively use the ISE these days, I have found very few reasons to use the console. That is a different discussion.

 

What is put in the profile script?

Well, that is really the question I've been asking myself. I find that just about every time I launch the ISE I think of something that I need to have available to me. For example I use the Specops PowerShell cmdlets every day. The cmdlets and functions that come through our Deploy products are PowerShell modules. Our Specops Password products expose their commands through PSSnapIns. PSSnapIns and some modules need to be loaded explicitly.

• Add-PSSnapIn -Module specopssoft.specopspasswordpolicy
• Import-Module -Module specopsdeploy

Another thing I do on a regular basis is update the help content. Now this is a bit much for a profile in my experience but it can catch updated content when available. If there are specific modules that you utilize all the time you can update those individually. This command updates the help content.

• Update-Help
• Update-Help -Module Hyper-V

Many of my friends and colleagues use PowerShell and some are true power users. Their profile scripts include quite a bit of automation. These are just simple examples share yours.

 

Starting the console with the focus on a directory that is used for most tasks is also very helpful.

• Set-Location c:\psstuff

How to Update the profile script

The path to the profile script is stored in the $Profile variable. Above you can see the data stored in this variable for the ISE. When you want to edit your profile script simply type

 

 

 

 

This will launch notepad with the profile script.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And that is that

Save the script, close the ISE and re-launch it. the configuration your have in the script will run. If you haven't updated help content in a while this one can take a while. So use that with the understanding of what it is doing.