Dmitry's PowerBlog: PowerShell and beyond

Restore Exchange data from PowerShell

Dmitry Sotnikov — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:00:24 +0000

Working with mail backups can be a pain. Especially when you need to do some kind of bulk operations like scan backups for particular mailboxes and find all emails with certain keywords and then export then to a PST or add them to a public folder.

Quest has recently PowerShell-enabled its Exchange/Notes/PST backup/recovery product – and we got a lot of great functionality available for your scripts/command line.

Here are a few examples:

Here’s how you can attach a standard Exchange backup and retrieve its messages as .msg files:

Attach-RMEExchangeDB -EdbPath "C:\Data\Edb\EdbSearchTest\EdbSearchTest.edb" | Get-RMEMessage | Export-RMEMessage -ExportPath "C:\Data\Exported\Msg" -Type Msg

Or look for particular keywords in Lotus Notes data:

Attach-RMELotusDB "C:\Data\Nsf" | Get-RMEMessage -SearchIn Subject, Body -Text "test" | Export-RMEMessage -ExportPath "C:\Data\Exported\Eml" -Type Eml

Or restore a folder to PST:

Attach-RMEExchangeDB "C:\Data\Edb\EdbSearchTest\EdbSearchTest.edb" | Get-RMEFolder "John Doe\Inbox" | Restore-RMEFolder -TargetPath "C:\Data\Restored\Pst"
Obviously you can restore to live mailboxes and public folders, work with attachments, and so on, and so forth.

Here’s full list of the cmdlets – each of the pages has examples and details on parameters, etc.:

Note that unlike AD cmdlets these are actually a part of commercial product so there is cost involved. You can get a trial license from the product page. If you are a Microsoft MVP you can also get a free NFR license by applying here.

Catch variable typos

Dmitry Sotnikov — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:00:17 +0000

Did you know that PowerShell has so called strict mode in which it can catch and report any use of uninitialized variables? I’ve started doing this while scripting and it made debugging scripts so much easier! Lot’s of typos and copy/paste issues simply get detected right away.

In PowerShell v1 you can turn this mode on by executing: Set-PSDebug –strict

In PowerShell v2 by doing: Set-StrictMode –version 1 or Set-StrictMode –version 2.

(See this great article explaining all the difference.)

To make this apply to all my debugging sessions, but not to command line and PowerGUI admin console, I did the following:

1. Opened my PowerShell profile:

2. Added this code in there:

if ($host.Name -eq 'PowerGUIScriptEditorHost') {
    Set-StrictMode -Version 2.0
}

That’s it. Close the profile and restart the PowerGUI Script Editor.

P.S. Please forgive me the “if” workaround in common profile. In the future we will at some point start supporting a separate profile specifically for the script editor. This is the best practice and we’ll get there.

Customize hotkeys in PowerGUI Script Editor

Dmitry Sotnikov — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:00:29 +0000

One of the hidden gems in PowerGUI Script Editor is the ability to fully customize its toolbars and hotkeys.

Say, you want to have a hotkey to collapse all regions in a PowerShell script – this could not be easier, just:

On the Tools menu, click Customize.
In the Customize dialog box, click the Keyboard tab.
On the Keyboard tab, select the command you need.
In the Press shortcut key(s), assign the hotkey you want.

Other tabs of this dialog box are also useful:

Toolbars - lets you create your own toolbars.
Commands - lets you add buttons to existing toolbars by simply dragging them from the dialog box to the toolbar.

Hope this makes your PowerShell scripting even more enjoyable!

PowerShell Help Reader

Dmitry Sotnikov — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:00:25 +0000

Alexei Martseniuk (one of the developers on the original PowerGUI team) has developed a nice little PowerShell utility – WPF-based PowerShell Help Reader.

It makes searching and using the PowerShell help system easier and just a more pleasant experience. You can see a demo, download a 21-day trial version or buy full version here.

New PowerShell MVPs

Dmitry Sotnikov — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:00:54 +0000

Two prominent members of the PowerShell community got Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award yesterday:

	Joel “Jaykul” Bennett – the creator of the PowerBoots UI library for PowerShell and PoshCode.org – the online script repository behind PowerGUI’s Online Search.
	Jonathan Noble – a very active member of UK PowerShell Usergroup and TechNet UK IT Professional Community Council, and also one of the co-creators of TweeterTags.com

MVP award is extremely valuable in the Microsoft world. It is only granted to the individuals who are actively helping the community and are pushing the boundaries of the technology.

And the award is granted for just one year – to keep you motivated if you want to be re-awarded. Speaking of which quite a few PowerShell folks got re-awarded yesterday as well (naming just those who I know got the award – there are a lot more):

You can find full list of PowerShell MVPs and more information on each of them (luckily I can say “us” ) here.

Congratulations to Joel and Jonathan, and everyone who got re-awarded!

Build Org Charts with PowerShell

Dmitry Sotnikov — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:06:09 +0000

Kirk has recently published his Org Chart PowerPack which frankly I myself have been using a lot lately.

For anyone working in a medium to large size of company this is just a great tool to navigate your organization and even produce html and Visio reports about it:

Does your HR have anything like that? Send them the link to the demo and get them addicted to PowerShell!

Read more about the PowerPack in Kirk’s blog.

Prevent desktop lock or screensaver with PowerShell

Dmitry Sotnikov — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:00:53 +0000

Imagine that there’s a webcast that you absolutely need to record and your girlfriend calls because she had a bad dream and you need to go to give her consolation, or it’s your daughter’s birthday, or simply 11 pm because the Earth is huge and the timezones suck. Your first reaction is to simply try to record the webcast but this is a corporate PC and group policy is configured to lock the desktop after x minutes of inactivity. What do you do?

I found myself in this situation a few days ago, and did not want to search the internet and download a random executable simulating user activity and doing who knows what else on my computer.

Instead I wrote this simple PowerShell script:

param($minutes = 60)

$myshell = New-Object -com "Wscript.Shell"

for ($i = 0; $i -lt $minutes; $i++) {
  Start-Sleep -Seconds 60
  $myshell.sendkeys(".")
}

All the script does is creates a Windows scripting shell com object, and then for the specified number of minutes (which is a script parameter) every minute presses the “.” key.

Then I saved the script as Prevent-Screensaver.ps1 file (”prevent” is not a proper PowerShell verb, but disable- or stop- do not seem quite right…) and started it from PowerShell command-line: & c:\Prevent-Screensaver.ps1 120

One other thing which I also did was starting a notepad and clicking into it. This made the script output the dots into the application rather than overload Windows input buffer (which would have caused the OS to start beeping.)

Oh, and before anyone adds comments on how I have just ruined desktop security in the enterprise… By using this you might be circumventing security measures which your company might have for a reason. Check with your HR/IT/legal department/manager when in doubt.

Exchange 14 PowerGUI wallpaper

Dmitry Sotnikov — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:00:11 +0000

Oz (Exchange MVP doing a great series of Exchange/PowerShell/PowerGUI How-To’s) has also posted a bunch of Exchange 2010 desktop wallpapers – one of them featuring PowerGUI.

Download them here.

Add great HTML reports to PowerGUI

Dmitry Sotnikov — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:00:19 +0000

Kirk has recently published a PowerPack which adds really nice-looking reports to PowerGUI Admin Console. Once you install the pack you will get these reports for any systems you manage: AD, Exchange, Operations Manager, VMware, Hyper-V – you name it.

See this video for details:

Download the PowerPack here.

3 cmdlets a day keep the trouble away

Dmitry Sotnikov — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:00:17 +0000

There’s yet another reason to follow @PowerGUIorg on Twitter.

Our friendly community site ghost now 3 times a day tweets a random PowerShell cmdlet with the cmdlet name, synopsis, and link to the cmdlet page which has detailed cmdlet information: full description, parameters, examples, and so on.

This should be a great way to learn cmdlets shipped with PowerShell v2 (some are obviously present in v1 as well) in small easy chunks.

@PowerGUIorg also tweets each time a new discussion is started at PowerGUI.org forums – so you can easily get involved in any topic which you find interesting or perhaps help somebody out if you know the answer.

Follow @PowerGUIorg and let us know what you think. Any ideas on making this feed even more useful are welcome!