By Joe Brinkman on Sunday, December 16, 2007 6:30 PM

Several months ago I stumbled upon PowerGadgets and have been finding more and more uses for it ever since.  I was initially intrigued by the ability to run powershell scripts but didn't have any immediate needs that required that much power.  One of the strengths of PowerGadgets is the ability to run database queries and then to present the data using very slick graphs, guages and maps. Read More »

By Joe Brinkman on Friday, October 19, 2007 9:13 AM

In my last post Getting a Username/Password in PowerShell (cross posted to PowerShellCommunity.org), I was asked why not just use the Add-Member cmdlet.  Having been doing software development for my entire adult life, this is not the first time this question has come up.  Ok.  Maybe not those exact words, but something very similar - why use code X when code Y does the same thing.  Where I come from there is really only one response to this - look at both code alternatives and determine which one is the most efficient at doing the job without also becoming a maintenance problem.  So lets take a peek under the hood a bit so we can see why I chose PSObject.Members.Add over using the Add-Member cmdlet.

Read More »

By Joe Brinkman on Friday, October 19, 2007 9:12 AM

As part of getting ready for my PowerShell session at OpenForce '07, I am creating a set of helper functions for working with SMO to manipulate and query the database server.  A common need when working with the database is to pass the username and password to various SMO methods.  When I first started coding my examples, I just passed a username and password as parameters into my functions.  This works, but does not exactly look professional when you are sitting in a presentation and typing out passwords in plaintext.

Read More »