Reader small image

You're reading from  Learning PowerCLI - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inFeb 2017
Publisher
ISBN-139781786468017
Edition2nd Edition
Right arrow
Author (1)
Robert van den Nieuwendijk
Robert van den Nieuwendijk
author image
Robert van den Nieuwendijk

Robert van den Nieuwendijk is an IT veteran from the Netherlands with over thirty years of experience in Information Technology. He holds a bachelor degree in software engineering. After working a few years as a programmer of air traffic control and vessel traffic management systems, he started his own company Van den Nieuwendijk Informatica in 1988. Since then he has worked as a freelance systems administrator of OpenVMS, Windows Server, Linux, and VMware vSphere systems, for Dutch governmental organizations and cloud providers. During winter he is also a ski and snowboard instructor at an indoor ski school. With his background as a programmer, he always tries to make his job easier by writing programs or scripts to perform repeating tasks. In the past, he used the C programming language, OpenVMS DCL, Visual Basic Script and KiXtart to do this. Now, he uses Microsoft PowerShell and VMware PowerCLI for all of his scripting work. Robert is a frequent contributor and moderator at the VMware VMTN Communities. Since 2012 VMware awarded him the vExpert title for his significant contributions to the community and a willingness to share his expertise with others. He has a blog at http://rvdnieuwendijk.com where he writes mainly about VMware PowerCLI, Microsoft PowerShell, and VMware vSphere. If you want to get in touch with Robert, then you can find him on Twitter. His username is @rvdnieuwendijk. Robert is also the author of Learning PowerCLI, Packt Publishing.
Read more about Robert van den Nieuwendijk

Right arrow

Using COM objects


You can also use the New-Object cmdlet to create an instance of a COM object. COM objects were used a lot in VBScript. In PowerShell, you can still use them to do things that you cannot do in native PowerShell. The following example will use the SAPI.SpVoice COM object to output a text as voice. It will say The script is finished. Append this piece of code at the end of your PowerCLI script, and you will hear your computer say that the script is finished so that you don't have to keep watching your computer screen. Isn't this cool?

PowerCLI C:\> $Voice = New-Object -ComObject SAPI.SpVoice
PowerCLI C:\> $Voice.Speak("The script is finished.") | Out-Null

The output of the $Voice.Speak() method is piped to the Out-Null cmdlet to suppress output to the screen. The Out-Null cmdlet sends the output to the NULL device, which is the same as deleting it.

You can get a list of all of the COM objects on your computer with the following PowerShell code:

Get-ChildItem -Path HKLM...
lock icon
The rest of the page is locked
Previous PageNext Page
You have been reading a chapter from
Learning PowerCLI - Second Edition
Published in: Feb 2017Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781786468017

Author (1)

author image
Robert van den Nieuwendijk

Robert van den Nieuwendijk is an IT veteran from the Netherlands with over thirty years of experience in Information Technology. He holds a bachelor degree in software engineering. After working a few years as a programmer of air traffic control and vessel traffic management systems, he started his own company Van den Nieuwendijk Informatica in 1988. Since then he has worked as a freelance systems administrator of OpenVMS, Windows Server, Linux, and VMware vSphere systems, for Dutch governmental organizations and cloud providers. During winter he is also a ski and snowboard instructor at an indoor ski school. With his background as a programmer, he always tries to make his job easier by writing programs or scripts to perform repeating tasks. In the past, he used the C programming language, OpenVMS DCL, Visual Basic Script and KiXtart to do this. Now, he uses Microsoft PowerShell and VMware PowerCLI for all of his scripting work. Robert is a frequent contributor and moderator at the VMware VMTN Communities. Since 2012 VMware awarded him the vExpert title for his significant contributions to the community and a willingness to share his expertise with others. He has a blog at http://rvdnieuwendijk.com where he writes mainly about VMware PowerCLI, Microsoft PowerShell, and VMware vSphere. If you want to get in touch with Robert, then you can find him on Twitter. His username is @rvdnieuwendijk. Robert is also the author of Learning PowerCLI, Packt Publishing.
Read more about Robert van den Nieuwendijk