In this article we are going to discuss basics of how to control code execution in a PowerShell script. There are several keywords, which have slightly different behavior - BREAK, RETURN and EXIT.

Actually, there are many ways to get name of the user, which is currently logged on, including built-in .NET commands. But let's keep our code clean and stick with native PowerShell.

Despite what people are saying on the net, you do not need to write your own method to include milliseconds when formatting DateTime object. To achieve this, you can use “f”. For example, if you want to include thousands of a second (i.e. milliseconds), you can write something like this [...]

This appears to be a known bug in Visual Studio. I encountered it when my VS 2008 SP1 was idle for a considerable amount of time, hanging minimized in the task bar. Standard close/reopen VS did not help. There were no strange processes in Task Manager either. After some failed commands (same error), I found a workaround for this issue.

There are tons of ways to check if the port is open on a remote server. I think I found the fastest one, which is a Powershell one-liner.

That's actually pretty simple, you just need to run this utility [...] Where D is your CD/DVD drive with Windows 2008 R2. In our case it was a virtual drive mounted in Hyper-V, but I think it does not really matter. I did preparation for both forest and domain, because in our situation they are identical.

After some point we had too many virtual machines to keep track of updates locally. So we decided to try Microsoft's solution called WSUS. It took some time to install, the whole process could have been easier, cause I had to google every part of it. When we finally had it working, there was a problem with detection of our virtual machines.

So we switched to a new provider and I had to change primary DNS to another server. Yes, we decided to have another server for this purpose, just to have a backup in case anything goes wrong. And we actually made use of that old server, because some of our domain records took longer to update, than it was expected. Anyway, let's skip unneeded details and roll down to the topic of this post.

My primary concern to upgrade was photo editing. I have a Canon Rebel XSI (450D), which takes 12MP photos. Unfortunately, I'm not yet a very good photographer, probably just need more practice. Anyway, editing photos became a frequent task. For some reason Phenom 9500 is pretty slow on those large ones. And it used to take me around 2-3 seconds to perform simple transformations. Having heard enough about the benefits of Phenom II, I decided to push forward and buy Phenom 955.

I noticed many people on the net are looking for this review, or at least for anything that could prove they are not alone. Well, guys, here's what you wanted to hear - yes, our 9 x G6 DL380 servers kept rebooting unexpectedly for quite a while. Not all at once, but still annoying. It all happened at random until we contacted HP and their tech told us to update firmware.