April 2007
Intermediate to advanced
551 pages
12h 9m
English
Content preview from Professional Windows® PowerShell
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13.2. Working with Specific Applications
The following sections describe how to access a number of commonly used COM applications and carry out some tasks from Windows PowerShell. The extent of useful automation you can achieve with any individual COM object depends on the members that are exposed to you and your knowledge of those members. If you want to explore the possibilities of a particular unfamiliar COM object, use the get-member cmdlet to find which methods and properties you can access.
13.2.1. Working with Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer is one of the most easily manipulated COM applications. To launch an instance of Internet Explorer, type the following command:
$ie = new-object -comobject InternetExplorer.application
After a short pause it seems that nothing has happened, since the PowerShell cursor is displayed. No new Internet Explorer window is displayed. However, if you type a command like
$ie.visible
the value False is displayed on the console so you know that the $ie object exists and has a visible property. If the $ie object or its visible property didn't exist, you would expect Windows PowerShell to either display nothing (assuming that the $erroraction variable was set to SilentlyContinue) or display an error message saying that the object or property didn't exist. I discuss errors in Chapter 17.
You can explore the properties of the $ie object by using the command
$ie | get-member -memberType property
and the information shown in Figure 13-1 is displayed, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.