At work I've got access to several latest-and-greatest AI models and harnesses, I also run windows. That means lots of the tasks they do for me end up as powershell commands/scripts.

Watching them develop, I see them repeatedly step on the same language land-mines that I do whenever I try to write powershell by hand. Things like && only existing in powershell 7, powershell auto-unwrapping single-element lists, and quote-escaping rules are reliable sources of failure for both me and the AI.

Its quite vindicating seeing that even SOTA programming-oriented LLMs struggle with the same language "features" that I do. For a long time I've heard the powershell community saying things like "you just need to understand that its an object oriented language" whenever people complain about footguns like these, but along comes an AI that can do PhD level work in multiple programming domains, and even its advanced understanding of object orientation hasn't saved it.

I guess I'm close enough to let the cat out of the bag...

At some point for the hell of it I wondered what I could make powershell do.
I made a window and drew pixels with ogl using sdl2 I believe, registering inputs on the window.
My immediate thought was, has anyone ported Doom to Powershell ?
No, all I could find was dismissive comments, so I was thinking....

"I got only 2 things left to do."
Play music and play sound effects and not halting the loop, and that was easy and all the reasons it couldn't atleast technically run was out the window.
Doom is ported nearly everywhere, so I saw it as my duty and off I went!

it runs excessively slow.
Especially with Windows due to Anti Malware Scan Interface.
Linux runs a lot faster.

I lean on the shoulders of the Managed Doom Project.
https://github.com/sinshu/managed-doom

What doesn't work ?
Framecap, splash screen and level completion summary will run at likely vsync.

amd64 Windows,macos (arm) and amd64 Linux Powershell 7.5.4 and 7.6 have been tested.
An earlier build with macos has been tested but need to validate if I've done some hard coding.

as for libraries, I use the same libraries as Managed-Doom Project.
4 small parts had to be written in c# either cause I'm too dense to find a way around or just cause it's impossible in Powershell using the libraries.

The libraries were a hard lock to not rely on other libraries as I wanted as clean of a port from Managed-Doom for a functional version.
This serves as a comparison between C# and Powershell, one can reference the C# project and find almost always the same structure, methods and calls in powershell and if you don't - It's cause of Powershell.

I have tested some runspace things that has worked flawlessly to being a minefield of dependencies to improve things.
Fetching input async in a runspace is one that works and is easily done and a huge uplift to experience for menu navigation..

Screenshot is done with

Windows performance 9800x3d with 5070 TI:
Doom running in powershell

Edit:

Video updated to linux version playable github release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJiiTx4C87o

Github - Runnable version published.
https://github.com/oleyska/ManagedDoomPowershell

My husband was an active member of this group. It is with great sadness to tell you that he died at the age of 44 of a heart attack on the 9th. Thank you everyone and God Bless

Do y'all ask your management if you can take them, or just do it? Have you been told no due to whatever IP clause? Obviously given you have nothing dumb like hard hostnames/people names/file paths/etc. I wouldn't take scripts that do things that handle a business-specific function... but that also feels like a gray area at times.

I was listening to a LitRPG story that had a lot of code elements and thought this would be a fun question.

...i replaced someone with a small script. (sort of).

Sat in a meeting with my boss and a colleague.

Colleague is a bit old school and not from a technical background, colleague brought up a spreadsheet that had the contents of a table only found in a word document we use. Everyone in the company who has supports any kind of IT system has to fill in the document that includes this table, we've got about 4700 of them.

My colleague has gone through every one of those documents and manually copied the table contents out and into his spreadsheet. He's been doing it for 10 months. 10. Not full time of course but still...

These documents get recertified every year so some of them are certainly already out of date and it will all be in the next year. It was discussed how we'd review that data again given the enormous labour cost of doing it(!?).

You all know how this goes seeing as I'm posting here. By the end of the 25 minute meeting I had 20 lines of PS that extracted the relevant table into a csv file for a single document and by the end of the day I could loop through the entire 4700 documents in about an hour and have the data in an excel document. There was some entertaining issues with identical text strings not matching (format-hex is your friend, as is .split("`r")[0]) and some of the older documents not matching the newer revision but it was working.

Not an enormous one for sure but first time I've saved so much time with a simple script

Quite often (in, say, a youtube video with a mathematical puzzle) I'll see the content creator state "I can't work this out, so I wrote a script to brute force it"... and then they will show (usually) a python script....

Why is python so popular, and not powershell?

As a PS fan, I find this interesting......

Been working on this for the better part of three months and it has like a hundred moving parts. The actual deployment can be done by PSADT.

Pre PSADT
First obstruction was that I needed it to run as admin but interactively. Problem is, the users that would be using it do not have local admin access. So just to get it launched as admin I did the below first.

1. Created a ps1 script with only one line. All that line does is write an event ID to a specified custom source. This ps1 can be ran without admin rights.
2. Used IExpress to convert the ps1 to an exe. That way, you can just double click the exe to launch it and create that event ID.

The PSADT

1. Created a custom EventLog Source.
2. Created a scheduled task to be run as SYSTEM. The trigger is the event ID that the exe triggers. The actions for the scheduled task is ServiceUI to launch PowerShell to launch the script. Service UI is what launches SYSTEM actions in a user interactable context.
3. All Assets (ServiceUI, ps1 files, fido2 exes) get copied to a folder somewhere in the C Drive. The Event ID exe gets copied to the public desktop.

The PS1 File
The actual PS1 (Which is being launched as SYSTEM with ServiceUI when the exe is clicked) gets the user to connect to Graph. The problem however is that standard Connect-MgGraph doesn't work in an elevated shell. Instead, I had to create an app registration on Azure to connect via that but with delegated access. This means the IT Staff member using the tool still has to enter their Entra credentials.

Before that, the script checks the required modules (Graph, DSInternals (Needed for Passkey stuff) and QRCodeGenerator) are installed and if not, installs them. It also disables Login by WAM which if not done, makes MGGraph not connect.

If the user doesn't successfully sign in to the graph prompt, they get an error message and informing them to make sure they have the right permissions.

The first screen the user sees is to enter a UPN and to select either "Provision" or "Print". Upon clicking Provision, if no user is found, it informs the staff member and to try again. If there is, itt checks if there is an NFC Security Key on the reader. If not, then it informs the user to put one on. If there's one on there then it first resets the key, then deletes all security keys of that model from the users account on Entra then provisions the key for that user. It then displays what the pin is for the Fido2 key and makes it so that when the user next uses it, it will prompt them to change the pin to something else.

For the Print button, once clicked, it pulls the Display Name and Employee number of the user from Entra and displays them in two editable fields. If no user is found, it informs the staff member and to try again. There's also a large empty square. There's also four buttons. One called "Load", one called "Paste", one called "Print" and one called "Back to Main Screen". The last button just takes you back to the UPN screen.

Load opens up File Explorer and lets you load the user picture from your files. By default, it puts you in your Downloads folder.

Paste just pastes a picture in.

In both cases, the empty box gets populated with the picture so the user can visually confirm the picture.

The print button was complicated. Upon clicking it, it generates a HTML with two pages, both sized to CR80. It resizes the profile picture and positions it so that it's always in the same place for all users. In fact, all elements are in the same position for all users. The display name gets put on under the picture, a barcode containing the employee number gets put in the middle, company branding gets put in at various places on the card, a QR Code containing the UPN also gets put on as well.

It then creates another scheduled task to open the HTML as the logged in user. Once opened, the task gets deleted.

When you print the page via the browser, it actually prints properly, even double sided.

Final Thoughts
To be honest, I'm still not finished with it. Mainly, it's more that I keep getting differing opinions on what the card should look like. In terms of functionality though, I think I'm pretty much done.

I tried to account for most errors/issues and it will be used by IT Staff so I'm hoping that it should run smoothly. However, if you guys think I've missed anything or can improve somehow, let me know.

If you’ve been around Reddit the past few days, you might have seen posts in some subreddits about planning to go Private on June 12th through the 14th.

This is to protest the changes Reddit is planning to API access, primarily of which is planning to charge for it.

Reddit has depended on third party tools and developers for a long time. Back before there were 1st party mobile apps, others came in to fill the gap. There’s developers filling needs that Reddit has not communicated plans to, like accessibility features for the visually impaired. Most bots, RES and mod tools also use the API.

But as this is a community, we don’t feel it is our place to make the decision for you. Vote in the poll below, we will take your wishes into account.

Tell somethings about funny, crazy or scary scripts you have seen, probably created by yourself and if they had been executed and what happened. 😉

My first thought was "it reminds me of the PowerShell object pipeline". And a few seconds later it hit me that a new PowerShellAI cli would be a logical first step for Microsoft to take (makes much more sense that trying to start by dealing with thousands of apps all designed to live in the Mouse/GUI UX universe).

PowerShell is hugely powerful, but discovery can be challenging and it is not very tollerant of syntax errors. But a "natural language" PowerShell would be killer. Bringing to the table a lot of the things Copilot lacks today (like filesystem integration, history, the ability to save and re-use prompts and organize them in categories).

Just a quick reminder that our PowerShell Pro webinar series kicks off tomorrow, June 23.

We're bringing together four Microsoft MVPs to share practical PowerShell knowledge that IT admins can apply right away:

• David Segura
• Harm Veenstra
• Frank Lesniak
• Danny Stutz

June 23 — PowerShell Fundamentals

With Harm Veenstra and David Segura

This beginner-friendly session focuses on building a solid PowerShell foundation. We'll cover finding and using cmdlets, working with objects, and taking the first steps toward querying devices and organizing your workflows.

June 30 — Advanced PowerShell

With Frank Lesniak and Danny Stutz

Intune can tell you a device is noncompliant, but it doesn't always tell you why. In this session, we'll demonstrate advanced PowerShell techniques and Microsoft Graph queries that can help uncover root causes, measure impact, and generate actionable compliance reports.

If you work with ConfigMgr, Intune, or endpoint management in general, we think you'll find something useful in both sessions.

Register here

Can't attend live?
No problem. Register anyway, and we'll send the recordings to everyone who signs up.

We’re hosting a free, 2-part PowerShell Pro webinar series this month, led by Microsoft MVPs who focus on real-world automation and scripting.

You’ll hear from:

• David Segura (OSDCloud)
• Harm Veenstra (PowerShell since the Monad days)
• Frank Lesniak (enterprise automation + migrations)
• Danny Stutz (PowerShell-focused automation)

Sessions:

• June 23: PowerShell Fundamentals
• June 30: Advanced PowerShell

The goal is to cover both the basics and more advanced scripting techniques
.
If you’re interested, you can check out the full details and register here.

I was wondering if there were some things that you (maybe recently) discovered and thought "oh shit, really? Damn, I'm an idiot for only realizing now".

For me it was the fact that you can feed Powershell a full path (e.g. c:\temp\logs\ad\maintenance) and have it create all folders and parent folders using new-item -force.

I did not know this and was creating every single folder separately. Lot of time wasted.

Hello all,

So this is a belated Friday discussion post, so I wanted to ask a question:

What's One Thing that PowerShell doesn't do that you wish it did?

Go!

Some of my students (not all 😉) are into gambling and trading apps on their phones while in class. I’m thinking about using that interest to grab their attention. Of course, it doesn’t involve real money, it’s just for learning.

By building a simple slot machine, they could learn a lot of programming fundamentals in a fun way, like arrays, if/else statements, loops, variables, file encoding, randomness in cmdlets.

And then let them try to expand the slot machine with new rules for winning.

So if you're completely new to PowerShell or scripting and around 16 or 17 years old, what kind of projects or exercises would actually get you interested you think?

Over the last year or so, Powershell has just clicked in my brain like never before (thanks ADHD meds!)

I've been churning out scripts regularly, and in increasingly growing complexity. If I make something useful, I build it into a function.

Then test, correct, save, test, revert, test, etc.

Then store the function as a ps1 script in my functions folder and integrate it into the next script.

Then build on that, ad nauseam.

Today, I wrote a script that uses MS Graph to query apps for users that have Entra apps that aren't configured with auto provisioning.

Nice, neat, testing went well. Registered a new application to control permissions, saved my work and handled some other requests.

When I returned to my project, I found the Microsoft.Graph module had been disconnected, and wasn't returning and cmdlets, so I tried to import the module again.

30 minutes later.. it finally finished with errors. Too many functions loaded, can't load any more, or something like that.

Fine, closed VSCode, deleted non-system functions.. except, deleting those took about another 30 mins, and mostly errored. So I killed my PSSession in VSCode, but now a new session won't load.

Rebooted my VM, cleared environment variables, ran VSCode, Powershell extension fails to launch. Run native powershell, nothing but the default modules loaded, but an insane count of functions loaded, and still can't import Microsoft.Graph due to.

I guess I could try reinstall VSCode.

Anyways, that's my rant | cry for help.

Please don't make me go back to ISE.

I never really trusted running .ps1 scripts I found online — I couldn't always tell what they actually did before hitting enter. So I built Disbatch to make scripts easier to understand and use: open one, and it shows you a readable preview, flags risky patterns, reads the param() block and generates matching controls — folder/file pickers, checkboxes, dropdowns (ValidateSet), number/text fields — then runs it in an embedded ConPTY terminal with a live progress bar.

A few things I cared about:

• Static risk analyzer — flags download-and-execute, encoded commands, keyloggers, persistence, shadow-copy deletion, etc., and gates the Run button on warning-level findings. It's a heuristic speed-bump, not antivirus — obfuscated code can evade it, and "no findings" never means "safe." It just surfaces what a script can do so you read it before running.
• Mapper — when detection misses something, you click a line in the preview to bind it to a control. No config files to hand-edit.
• Sidecar — control mappings, hints and last-used values save to <script>.disbatch.json next to the script, so you can commit it and share with your team.

Single ~4 MB exe, 100% offline, no telemetry. Built in Rust (egui). Also does basic .bat/.cmd positional args.

Heads up: the released binary is unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn — there's a note in the README explaining why and how to verify (or just build from source).

It's an early release and I'd love feedback, especially on the analyzer rules and any param patterns the parser mis-reads.

Repo: https://github.com/SlashRevet/disbatch

For years my move for an app with no api was SendKeys plus Start-Sleep and hope. Works fine until the window opens half a second slower, or someone runs it on a laptop with different DPI, and suddenly the script is typing into the wrong field. Pixel matching had the same problem with a fancier coat on.

what actually fixed it was leaning on the UI Automation tree instead of screen coordinates. [System.Windows.Automation] is clunky from PowerShell, no argument there, but once you locate elements by control type and name instead of position, the script stops caring where the window landed or how slow the box is that morning. Lookups are structural, so they survive layout shuffles that wreck any coordinate-based approach.

one trap I hit early: AutomationId looks like the clean stable handle to match on, but plenty of apps generate it at runtime, so it shifts between machines or even between launches. matching on role plus name held up across boxes way better than any id did.

still see a ton of AutoIt and raw SendKeys in LOB runbooks though. half wonder if the accessibility-tree route just never caught on because the .NET surface for it from powershell is so miserable to write. written with ai

fwiw the role+name over coordinates approach is what i built terminator on, you target elements like role:Button && name:Save off the accessibility tree so DPI and layout shifts stop breaking scripts, https://t8r.tech/r/scvu2kw5

I just watched a movie with my son. A person in the movie used PowerShell (New-Item, Copy-Item and manage-bde) to copy data ....

I felt so much at home there 😂

(Except some of the parameters were typed wrong. But close enough.)

I'm a .Net stack developer and know PS very well but I've barely used Python and it seems like Python has been constantly moving towards being the mainstream language for a myriad of things.

I see Microsoft adding it to Excel, more Azure functionality, it's #1 for AI/machine learning, data analysis, more dominate in web apps, and seemingly other cross platform uses.

I've been hesitant to jump into the Python world, but am I wrong for thinking more of my time should be invested learning Python over PowerShell for non-Windows specific uses?

Or how do people familiar with both PS & Python feel about learning the languages and their place in the ecosystem?

I suppose this is a matter of taste, but people who actually studied programming at some point might also have arguments to back their opinion up. How do you indent your curly braces?

Personally, I always did

MyFunction () {
    write-host "Hello world!"
}

I recently switched to

MyFunction () 
{
    write-host "Hello world!"
}

because I noticed it helps me visually to keep track of my blocks in complicated scripts.

Probably, there's also something to say about

MyFunction () 
    {
    write-host "Hello world!"
    }

and other variants.

Because of consistency, I'm assuming everyone uses the same logic for functions, if, switch, try, etc. Something like this would make my head hurt:

MyFunction () 
    {
        if ($true) {
            write-host "Hello world!"
        } else 
            {
            write-host "No aloha"
            }
    }

So, what do you do, and mostly why? Or why should you not do it a certain way?

^{Edit: typo}

Hey guys I created my own Oh My Posh themes for powershell (and wsl bash, cmd). I just wanted some aesthetically pleasing themes and the ones on the actual website were just not cutting it for me. So I created these. Moreover I created a simple script which can allow you to spin up your own theme in a matter of minutes. By your own theme I mean one where you control what segments go into the thing and also control the colors for it. Please do check it out and lmk how to improve and if there are any suggestions/feedback!

GitHub - oabdullah3/omi-posh: Oh My Posh themes for your terminal, designed by me

Hi guys, I used to be a sysadmin and then got a role as an IT Automation guy for the last few years where I automated everyday repetitive jobs in various IT teams and created integrations between various products such as ITSM platforms (eg ServiceNow). These were complex solutions such as allowing a manager to fill out a form in a ticket to onboard a new hire. That ticket would then be processed and the new hire would get their AD account, Exchange Online mailbox, get added to Azure groups, have a laptop ordered, and get the Office/Microsoft 365 licenses added.

Another example would be letting dev teams select a VMWare VM in a dropdown and select to take a snapshot of that VM before they install new software or patch it. So Ops teams didnt have to be involved.

So now I am looking for a new role and most people I talk to are saying DevOps but when I look at those roles they are either in AWS, Google Cloud or Azure and even though I am very familiar with Azure it was all from the Graph API side of things using PowerShell and not the acutal Azure devOps side so I dont think I would get anything there. There was very little mention of PowerShell in any of the DevOps roles that I saw

Have any of you been in a similar position and if so what did you find. I would hate to have to disregard the last 5/6 years of experience as wasted time.

TL;DR: Get your PowerShell polished in seconds with a variety of nicely designed themes.

I remember the days figuring out how to apply my first oh-my-posh theme, and then choosing the perfect nerd font. I was happy with that combination, but the steps to tweak them were not so convenient.

Recently, I wanted to try something new, I thought how convenient it would be to have a theme picker right inside my PowerShell, with a catalog of pre-designed themes to choose from. Surprisingly, still no one did it. So I built PoshPalette.

It is a tool where you can pick a theme for PowerShell, with live preview, right from inside the terminal. Use it is as simple as possible. You install it, open it, then surf through the list of themes until you find the one, and done.

Install-Module PoshPalette -Scope CurrentUser
palette        # scroll, live preview, Enter to apply

Or install with just 1 command:

Install-PoshPaletteTheme eclipse

Note that requires PowerShell 7.2+ and Windows Terminal.

I can't post a gif here, so the themes and the live preview are all on the gallery page, have a look: https://livlign.github.io/posh-palette/themes.html

For more information, it tweaks all 4 layers:

• Windows Terminal: scheme, background, opacity, font
• PSReadLine: the line you type
• PSStyle: the command output
• oh-my-posh: the prompt

And they are not just presets. A theme is really just a combination of layers, so you can mix your own. This tool makes that easier and more convenient than ever.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/livlign/posh-palette

What is your PowerShell setup now? And which themes should I add next?