Syntax highlighting

Updated the wordfile a little bit. This one includes all previous functions as well as the following:

1. PowerShell v4 cmdlets (the ones available when you open a new v4 session).
2. Exchange 2013 SP1 cmdlets
3. Lync 2013 cmdlets
4. Active Directory cmdlets

That adds up to 2834 cmdlets/functions that get syntax highlighting on top of the 137 aliases that are also in the file. The file also has variable highlighting, as well as operators and comp operators highlighting.

Formatting changes include the following:

1. code folding for (), so your long param() blocks can now be collapsed/expanded.
2. code folding for region/endregion. This mimics the behavior of ISE.

If you’d like to change the colors and/or fonts used for highlighting, go to View>Themes>Manage Themes, or Layout>Themes>Manage Themes (depending on your version of UltraEdit) as the styling in the wordfile is ignored starting with v20 of UltraEdit.

As with all other wordfiles, they are stored in “%appdata%\IDMComp\UltraEdit\Wordfiles\”, unless you change the path in Advanced>Configuration>Editor Display>Syntax Highlighting or Advanced>Settings>Editor Display>Syntax Highlighting (again, depending on your installed version of UltraEdit).

You can optionally set the “Highlight new file as:” to PowerShell, as I do (also shown above).

As soon as you place this wordfile in that folder, you should see PowerShell as an option under View>View as (Highlighting File Type)

Auto-complete

I’ve also created an auto complete file that contains the same cmdlet/function names as the syntax highlighting file. When enabled, you get tab completion of cmdlet and function names similar to the PowerShell console and ISE. Note, however, that in UltraEdit, you only get auto-complete of the cmdlet/function names, not their parameters.

You can save the file anywhere. Then, go to Advanced>Configuration>Editor>Word Wrap/Tab Settings (or Advanced>Settings>Editor>Word Wrap/Tab Settings) to specify the location within UltraEdit:

Then go to Auto-complete and check the box “Show auto-complete dialog automatically” and also enter a number in the box. 5 works for me.

Now, when typing a cmdlet/function that’s in the auto-complete file, you’ll get suggestions.

Up/down errors navigate through the list, and tab uses the highlighted suggestion.

Download

UltraEditSyntaxHighlighingAuto-CompleteFiles.zip

I have to admit I didn’t think I’d see this day. But MEC, the Microsoft Exchange Conference, is returning after a 10 year absence, according to Microsoft’s Michael Atalla, Director, Exchange Product Management.

If you’ve heard of the mysterious MEC, the rumors are true. A dedicated conference centered around Microsoft’s flagship messaging product. In depth technical sessions from Microsoft product group members giving you the very best bang for your conference buck. And a great chance for some social interaction with other messaging professionals.

I firmly believe that MEC is by far the best conference for a messaging professional using Microsoft products.

For more details, see the product group’s blog post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/03/06/mec-is-back.aspx. And, see the website www.MECisback.com.

I’ll see you there!

At least three times in the past couple of weeks, I’ve been asked how to dump the members of a DL to Excel for reporting.

Fortunately, it’s a very simple task using two PowerShell cmdlets, Get-DistributionGroupMember and Export-Csv.

Remember than in PowerShell, we can pipe the results of one command as input into another. So first, we get the membership of a list, then we send it to the CSV file for Excel. What we wind up with is:

Get-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "testdl" | Export-Csv -Path "C:\MyFile.Csv"

Where testdl is our distribution group, and myfile.csv is the resulting CSV file.

We can clean that up a little by using the -NoTypeInformation switch during the export-csv cmdlet so that we don’t get the top line of type information.

Get-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "testdl" | Export-Csv -Path "C:\MyFile.Csv" -NoTypeInformation

That gives us a nice clean CSV file that we can then further manipulate as needed in Excel.

If you’d like to learn a lot more about PowerShell and Exchange 2007, check out Professional Windows PowerShell for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 from Wrox. It’s a great reference book.