Clear AD attribute

Just yesterday a colleague of mine asked me how to undo an Active Directory object property change from the value he erroneously put back to <not set>. It turned out that I never actually blogged about that – so here you go.

Clearing AD attributes us actually as easy as just setting the value to $null. For example, here’s how you do it for properties which we have exposed in Set- cmdlets parameters:

Set-QADUser 'Amy Hardy' -City $null

Or for more internal attributes:

Set-QADUser 'Amy Hardy' -ObjectAttributes @{adminDescription=$null}

Hope that helps!

Advanced PowerShell Options in PowerGUI Script Editor

This add-on from James Brundage (from www.start-automating.com) lets you easily fine-tune the PowerShell host right in the PowerGUI Script Editor.

1. Download the PowerShell Preferences add-on from here,

2. Unblock the zip file,

3. Extract it to the My Documents \WindowsPowerShell \Modules folder,

4. In Script Editor’s File / PowerShell Libraries dialog box, select PowerShellPreferences.

And you will get this panel in the script editor, allowing you to change all the internal settings of the PowerShell host:

• Command history size,
• Error history size,
• Mail server for send-mailmessage,
• Strict mode (automated checking for variable initialization, etc.),
• What-if mode (automatically running all cmdlets with -whatif flag),
• Error level,
• Warning level,
• Debug level,
• Verbose message level,
• Progress message handling.

Combined, these give you incredible control over the way that PowerShell works – which in turn can help a lot when debugging your PowerShell scripts.

Download the add-on here.

Happy scripting!

Dmitry

Dynamsoft online source control in PowerGUI Script Editor

Claus Thude Nielsen posted a step by step tutorial on how you can get PowerGUI’s version control system to use Dynamsoft.

Which is very cool because Dynamsoft:

• Is a cloud system – so someone hosts that for you and can get to your files from anywhere,
• It is free for up to 25 MB – and 25 MB is a lot of PowerShell scripts!

Learn more about Dynamsoft and get the step-by-step tutorial here.

Also, I have previously published similar tutorials on:

• PowerGUI integration with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server,
• PowerGUI integration with Subversion (SVN).

Meet the PowerShell Team: Jon White

In this video interview, Test Lead of the Microsoft PowerShell team – Jon White – talks about the history of PowerShell and the current state of the PowerShell adoption. Check it out and I am sure you will learn a thing or two:

This is the last of the quick video chats we had at TechEd Europe in Berlin in November 2010. Also, check out the interviews with:

• Jeffrey Snover, Inventor of PowerShell and Lead Architect for Windows Server
• Rolf Masuch, lead of the German PowerShell Usergroup
• Frank Carius, Microsoft MVP, host of www.msxfaq.de on PowerShell in Exchange and Lync Servers