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Lee Holmes

Biography

Lee Holmes is a developer on the Microsoft Windows PowerShell team, and has been an authoritative source of information about PowerShell since its earliest betas. His vast experience with Windows PowerShell lets him to integrate both the 'how' and the 'why' into discussions. Lee’s integration with the PowerShell and administration community (via newsgroups, mailing lists, and blogs) gives him a great deal of insight into the problems faced by all levels of administrators, and PowerShell users alike.

Books

Windows PowerShell Pocket Reference Windows PowerShell Pocket Reference
by Lee Holmes
May 2008
Print: $12.99
Ebook: $10.99

Windows PowerShell Cookbook Windows PowerShell Cookbook
by Lee Holmes
October 2007
Print: $49.99
Ebook: $39.99

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Windows PowerShell Quick Reference Windows PowerShell Quick Reference
by Lee Holmes
September 2006
Print: $12.99

Blog

Lee's blog posts are hosted at:
http://www.leeholmes.com/blog

Mathematical Pumpkins

October 29 2009

Over the past few years, Pumpkin carving in my family has somehow ended up focusing on two themes: Math, and Knitting. A Sierpinski Triangle -- which surprisingly only took a toothpick or two to repair isolated triangles: Sierpinski Carpet (along with a wee bit of evil, of course:)   Not being one to… read more

Removing Deleted Items Left by the iPhone

October 28 2009

One thing you might notice if you have an iPhone connecting to an Inbox via the IMAP protocol is that messages you delete tend to stick around when viewed from other devices (such as Outlook, Outlook Web Access, etc.) This is caused by an out-of-date view of mail management, where your Inbox… read more

Scripting Network / TCP Connections in PowerShell

October 28 2009

Awhile back, I introduced a script that allows you interact with remote TCP ports (such as Telnet.) While useful, it worked only interactively. It would be even more useful if you were able to script a network or TCP connection. Let me introduce Send-TcpRequest.ps1 v2, which allows exactly that: First, a simple scripted… read more

PowerShell Activity Tracker

October 20 2009

  Download: http://www.leeholmes.com/projects/ActivityTracker/ActivityTracker.zip Over the summer, The Scripting Guys ran an excellent series for the 2009 Summer Scripting Games. They asked me to be a guest commentator for an event, and it turns out that it was something I’d been toying with in one version or another for some time. The topic of… read more

PowerShell Cryptography Library

October 19 2009

When playing with cryptography challenges (don’t we all?,) you end up leaning on a bunch of common tasks. For example, substituting all text in a string with a set of replacements (substitution ciphers,) XORing strings together, applying dictionary-based algorithms, investigating word frequency, and more. PowerShell lends itself really well to these challenges, and… read more

PowerShell RPN Calculator

October 12 2009

Adam Barr blogged bits and pieces of a PowerShell RPN calculator a few years ago: first the basics, and then some tweaks to clean it up. An RPN calculator, if you haven’t played with one before, flips the way you enter data. Rather than type “2 + 2”, you type “2 2 +”. RPN-style… read more

PowerScripting Podcast 85 – Eventing, Transactions, Security

September 28 2009

Last week, I dropped by to be interviewed on the PowerScripting Podcast. We chatted about providers, eventing, transactions, security, and a whole slew of V2 improvements that you probably didn’t know about! Give it a listen: http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/episode-85-lee-holmes-talks-about -v2/ read more

PowerShell Cookbook Now Available on iPhone

September 25 2009

Call me as shocked as anybody, but the iPhone app store now has a new entry: Although I can’t find any official information about it on the rest of the internet, O’Reilly has teamed up with Lexcycle (authors of the Stanza iPhone book reading application) to create iPhone applications for many of the… read more

PowerShell equivalent of NET HELPMSG

September 15 2009

Sometimes, people ask, “What’s the equivalent of NET HELPMSG” in PowerShell? NET HELPMSG is probably the easiest to remember (and works in PowerShell of course,) but PowerShell improves the experience a bunch by way of the .NET Framework. Suppose you get error 0x80070652 from an installer: C:\Users\leeholm>net helpmsg 0x80070652 The syntax of… read more

More advanced HTTP scripting: Facebook Photo Album Downloader

September 04 2009

I wanted to download a photo album from Facebook, but of course there’s no simple API or option to do that. Searching the internet finds a couple of options (a Firefox plugin, a Facebook app,) but I couldn’t seem to find anything standalone. This gives another great opportunity to talk about advanced… read more

Auto-Updating With No Reboot

July 06 2009

Despite being a fan of security, I’ve always run Windows Update in “Download and Notify” mode for all of my machines. Having Windows Update reboot my machine without warning at 3:00 AM is just too destructive. This has two negative effects: - Security patches that don’t require a reboot are needlessly postponed.… read more

Why So Secure?

July 06 2009

After working with PowerShell for awhile, then starting to write scripts, you quickly learn about PowerShell’s Execution Policy and other security features. You might even throw up your hands, and ask, “Why is this configuration so HARD? Why can’t it be as easy as VBS and Perl?” You can double-click on a VBS… read more

Get-Help –Online

June 09 2009

In CTP2 of PowerShell v2, we added a new parameter to Get-Help: Online. This parameter lets help authors declare an “online version” of their help topic, which PowerShell then launches with your default browser. For the PowerShell cmdlet help topics, we redirect to the excellent (and more frequently updated) online cmdlet help topics: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347701.aspx.… read more

Things more likely to kill you than Swine Flu

April 29 2009

There are a few. Based on worldwide numbers (160 confirmed deaths, 3000 “suspected” cases) Falling out of bed (900 confirmed deaths) Falling down the stairs (1,690 confirmed deaths) Big storm (874 confirmed deaths) Drinking binge (346 confirmed deaths) Of course, the statistic left out by the news Normal flu (36,000 confirmed deaths… read more

PowerShell Audio Sequencer

April 20 2009

I got forwarded an addictive interactive sequencer yesterday (http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix) and was immediately hooked. I asked an internal mailing list if there was any kind of hardware that lets you do this kind of thing on the couch, and got the response -- “you mean MIDI?” That’s close, but it is closer to a… read more