Richard Siddaway's Blog : COM

Create a calendar item

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:57:04 GMT

Continuing the occasional look at Outlook automation its time to see how we create a calendar item function new-calendaritem { param ( [string] $mailbox , [datetime] $start , [datetime] $end , [string] $subject , [string] $location , [string] $body )...(read more)

Controlling Firewall Rules

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:08:00 GMT

I decide that for this module I wanted some functions that control specific rule that I could be working with often e.g. Enable/Disable WMI rules and then I want a generic function for everything else. Lets start with some specifics. If we look at the...(read more)

Firewall rules (OK)

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 17:46:45 GMT

The really important thing about our firewall is the rules that are configured. function get-rule { [ CmdletBinding ( ) ] param ( ) BEGIN { } #begin PROCESS { $fw = New-Object -ComObject HNetCfg.FwPolicy2 $fw . Rules | foreach { $profiles = @( ) $ruleprofile...(read more)

Windows firewall

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:23:23 GMT

I normally leave the Windows firewall enabled in my test environment. It ensures I don’t forget it when testing. My recent session for the TechEd:Australia PowerShell conference involved me disabling various firewall rules on the subject machine to set...(read more)

Outlook Connector & mail folder item count

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 19:29:50 GMT

On my home laptop I use Live Mail to aggregate my hotmail accounts. On my travelling netbook I decided to try the Outlook Connector http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/microsoft-office-outlook-hotmail-connector-overview-HA010222518.aspx This...(read more)

IE history to CSV

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:12:17 GMT

Back in April last year I wrote a post about viewing IE history http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2010/04/13/ie-history.aspx I had a comment left asking how this could be put into a CSV file We’ll start by turning the script into an advanced...(read more)

Windows Updates: remote machines

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 19:06:22 GMT

My main blog is now at http://msmvps.com/blogs/RichardSiddaway/Default.aspx but I also maintain http://richardspowershellblog.wordpress.com/ as a mirror and in case I want the two to diverge at some point. My recent posts on accessing Windows updates...(read more)

Viewing favourites

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:51:54 GMT

I recently copied my favourites between machines which started me thinking about viewing favourites. Like many people I have generated a lot of favourites over the years – do I really need them all. Don’t know because I don’t know what they are. ...(read more)

Windows Updates: 3 Installing Updates

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 09:45:30 GMT

Now we have discovered the updates we have available we can think about installing them. 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 function ...(read more)

Windows Updates: 2 Installed updates

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 09:37:26 GMT

Testing for installed updates is a variation on what we saw last time. This will show updates that Windows updates has installed – Get-Hotfix will show all updates that have been installed. 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 function get-installedupdate...(read more)

Windows Updates: 1 Discovering Updates

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 18:59:48 GMT

I want to spend a few posts looking at Windows updates. There is a COM object model that enables us to work with the updates system. Any update processing starts with discovering the updates that are available 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 function...(read more)

Path to files on start menu

Richard Siddaway's Blog — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:28:46 GMT

I was asked today if it was possible the path to recent files that are shown on the start menu. I thought it was easy until I started digging into it. The files on the start menu are .lnk files and are in a binary format. 001 002 003 004 005...(read more)