Although PowerShell is an incredibly powerful automation platform [primarily] for Microsoft Windows systems, it does have some gaps that other tools can fill. One of those tools is called AutoIT, which many of you are probably familiar with prior to reading this. AutoIT can handle GUI automation much more easily than PowerShell, and is therefore a desirable alternative. But, what if you need to combine PowerShell automation and some GUI automation with AutoIT? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to simply call an AutoIT script from inside your PowerShell script, without having external dependencies to copy around alongside your PowerShell script?

Here is a simple helper function that will execute an AutoIT script in-line with your PowerShell code. I hope this makes it easier to integrate AutoIT with your existing and future PowerShell scripts. Although quite basic in its current form, this function could be enhanced to include support for firing off AutoIT scripts asynchronously, passing parameters into them, accepting output from AutoIT scripts, and so on.

Here’s a simple PowerShell script that you can use to retrieve a list of system names based off of a collection ID in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM / ConfigMgr) 2007. This has not been tested against collections that contain anything except system resources (computers objects in SCCM). Use at your own risk.

# Variables
$SiteCode = '123';
$SccmServer = 'sccmserver.mydomain.com';
$CollectionID = '12345678';

# Commands to retrieve client name list
$ClientList = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $SccmServer `
    -Namespace "rootsmssite_$SiteCode" `
    -Class SMS_FullCollectionMembership `
    -Filter "CollectionID = '$CollectionID'" `
    -Property @('Name');
$ClientNames = $ClientList | Select-Object Name
$ClientNames

I’ve been getting this error message a lot lately – does anyone have any idea what might cause it? I’ve usually got plenty of free memory when I get the message. I think it usually comes up after coming out of sleep and/or hibernate on my Windows 7 host OS.

“This virtual machine has encountered a problem acquiring the memory needed for it to run. Would you like to suspend the virtual machine to prevent data loss or allow it to continue running?”

Here is a screenshot of the memory configuration I’m using. I don’t want a lot of swapping going on, even though I’ve got a SSD – I’ve got 8GB of DDR3 in my laptop (Dell Latitude E6410), so I’d prefer to reserve all the RAM necessary for each VM.

Howdy folks,

The other day, I helped out Rob Collie (@powerpivotpro) with something, and in return he provided me a MSDN Ultimate subscription. I don’t really have a need for this, however, as I have MSDN and Technet access already, so I’m giving it away to someone in the community. I can’t think of any super creative ways to choose a winner, so I’ll go with the old “pick a number” routine, somewhere between 1 and 2000. The number has some significance to me, though I wouldn’t expect anyone else to know why that is.

The main rule is that you can only submit one number per 24-hour interval, and if you post more than once in 24 hours, you will be disqualified. So go ahead … post your guesses in the comments section! Comments will be closed at 9 AM Central Time on Friday, January 28th, 2011. The person with the closest number at that time will win the subscription.