Automate GUIs with UIAutomation in PowerShell

In this post, I would like to describe how to utilize the Microsoft UIAutomation framework through PowerShell to automate GUIs. Since the UIAutomation assembly already comes with .Net it also can be accessed directly through PowerShell. Using UIAutomation directly actually turns out to be quite cumbersome therefore I will also show you how to use …

Convert remote time to local time with ArgumentCompleter and ArgumentTransformation attributes

This article was inspired and is based on the concepts developed by Tobias Weltner (I learned a lot PowerShell concepts from Tobias already) in his excellent series of posts on PowerShell attributes. I would like to share a function that I have created to be able to convert a date and time from a remote …

PowerShell Get-Command -Syntax output explained

In this post, I would like to provide a detailed explanation of the Get-Command -Syntax output. While the output is documented (the format used is actually called a syntax diagram) I found parts of it rather confusing. As an example throughout this post, we will use the output of the command: The output looks quite …

Review of methods to download files using PowerShell

The goal of this post is to review and compare different methods to download files using PowerShell. As part of the review I would like to share (in addition to the inline source code you can also download a module (Get-FileMethods) that contains all functions via GitHub) some wrapper functions that follow the same pattern: …

PowerShell scope write-up

I have seen and experienced myself quite some confusion and frustration around the application and understanding of scope using PowerShell. This is an attempt to write up a summary of the different aspects of how PowerShell handles scope which hopefully helps some people to understand it better. TOC: Definition and purpose of scope Lexical vs. …