This is extremely easy using VB.NET or C# (pronounced C sharp) and the built in windows EXE file shutdown.exe. To shutdown, restart, or log off your computer is as simple as entering 1 line into your program, it just so happens that the 1 line is identical whether you’re using VB.NET or C#. Read more…
Creating different types of messages boxes in Visual Basic is a simple one line statement. I’m going to run through how to create several different types of message boxes in this tutorial, including OK Only, OK/Cancel, Abort/Retry/Ignore, and a Critical message box. Read more…
Merging files together, or to a seperate file, is a snap with PowerShell using the Get-Content cmdlet. If you’ve never used the Add-Content cmdlet, I would suggest first reading my other article Append Text to a File Using Add-Content. The first thing we need to do is identify our two files, in my case I’ll be using file1.log and file2.log. In the first example, I append all the text of file2.log into the end of file1.log. In the second example, I’ll create a completely new file and dump the contents of both the files into the newly created file. In the last example, I’ll add the current date to the filename of a completly new log file. Read more…
There’s been several times where I had an Apache server running locally on my computer as a development (or dev) server. Now if this is on my home network, or if your system administrator won’t give you your own custom host name then you have to go the DIY (do it yourself) route. But, often times, I have to hard code host names, or I need several different websites hosted on my personal machine. Well that’s where the hosts file comes into play. Read more…
Retrieving the owner and permissions of a file, folders and even registry keys is a breeze with PowerShell’s Get-Acl cmdlet. Let’s try checking to see who has access to to the C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator folder. Read more…
Pinging a computer is really simple, and of course since this is PowerShell we don’t want to use something as primitive as ping.exe, we want to use .NET and take advantage of all the method calls and filters. Read more…
The Environment class has a huge array of information and accessing this information is very simple, I’m going to try and give a whole bunch of one line examples of how to do this using PowerShell. Read more…
Thanks to the .NET library sending emails with PowerShell is surprisingly very simple! One thing to remember is line breaks, when you need a new line, make sure to use the escape characters `n . In the first example, I’ll send just a regular email, in the second I’ll send a SMS text message. Read more…
I was creating an application in Visual Basic the other day and I couldn’t remember how to check to see if a file exists, so I thought I would do a quick example to see if a file exitsts. If the file exists, the program will continue on, however, if the file doesn’t exist you will get a message box saying that the file does not exist, and the application will exit. Read more…
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to add text to the end of a text file using the Add-Content or its alias ac in PowerShell. In this first example let’s add "This is the last line" to the end of a file. Read more…