PowerShell Tips : Changing Monitor brightness using PowerShell.

 

 Do, you ever tried to change the monitor brightness using PowerShell. If not, than go and try it. It’s too cool.

You can use the below “WmiMonitorBrightnessMethods” class to set the brightness of the monitor. You need to use “WmiSetBrightness” method of the class to set brightness.

Do this:

1.       Set your monitor brightness to the full.

2.       Run the below command and see the result

 

(Get-WmiObject -Namespace root/WMI -Class WmiMonitorBrightnessMethods).WmiSetBrightness(1,20)

 

 

Amazed, Your monitor brightness will be set to 20.  You can set the value of brightness from 0-100 .

Just change the value of 20 in above command from 0-100.

if you want you can convert it to function too J ..

Go and test it J .

In-case you got an error, “Not Supported” that means you display driver won’t support it.

 

Happy Weekend.

Thanks

Aman Dhally

     

 

 

PowerShell and GUI : Working with GUI “Form” properties using PowerShell Studio 2012

 

In my previous post,Powershell Studio 2012 we had created a blank PowerShell GUI form, in this post, I am just sharing about few useful form properties.

Note: We are using Sapien PowerShell Studio 2012

Windows State of the form

If you want to run your GUI to me minimize, or maximize when they run, you are use the “WindowState” field property, to set it as per your needs, either, to stay, it Normal, Minimized or Maximized.

 

Customize Cursor.

Do you want to use a specific cursor for your PowerShell GUI applications, Yes! , you can, using the “Cursor” field property, just click on “Cursor” and choose the cursor which you like to use.

 

Setting Form Border Style

 

You, can also set the style of the form border, using “FormBorderStyle” field property. You can check the below table about the form border style vales and their effects on the form.

 

 

Value	Effect on the form
None	With No Border,
Fixed 3D	You, can’t resize the form, with ICON on the top, with Maximize, Minimize and cancel button  {not able to spot any big difference}
Fixed Single	You, can’t resize the form, with ICON on the top, with Maximize, Minimize and cancel button
Fixed Dialogue	You, can’t resize the form, with NO  ICON, with Maximize, Minimize and cancel button
Sizable	You, can resize form, with ICON on the top, with Maximize, Minimize and cancel button
FixedToolWindow	A form with a close button only. You, can’t resize the form.
SizableToolWindow	A form with a close button only. You, can resize the form.

That’s all for today, See you in my next post

 

Thanks

Regards

Aman Dhally

     

PowerShell and GUI : Creating a GUI form using PowerShell Studio

 

We all love PowerShell, because it is great tool for automation and creating scripts.

Sometimes GUI’s are useful too, sometime for fun and sometime it good to write our own tool for the company users.

Like creating a GUI toll about the information of users, disk space, or whatever you think of.

I use “PowerShell Studio 2012” for creating GUI’s. It is one of the best tool available out there for creating GUI’s, but unfortunate it is a paid one.

You can download the evaluation version of PowerShell Studio 2012 from this link : http://www.sapien.com/software/primalforms

I am writing these post by using “PowerShell Studio 2012”, but logic behind it is same.

As in GUI we are going to use Button, labels etc, and the functionality of these are same, in spite of how you are creating them.

Creating Form.

To create a new blank form,

1. Open PowerShell studio

2. Click on “New”

3. And click on “New Form”

4.

5. It will show you few templates, choose one as per you need.

6. I am selecting “Empty Form”. And Click on “Select”

7.

Form

Now, You, will see 3 screens, one is containing “Toolbox” which contain all graphic elements, in middle we have our new black form, and the third one the “Properties” windows. If you click any element, properties windows shows that element’s properties.

Customise form.

Now, let’s customize our form.

Changing form name.

To change the name of the form, click on the form, and in the property window , you see the “Text” field and in the front of it, you will see the value of the form, change is as per your need.

I am changing the value to “My First Form”.

You can see that the name of the form is changed.

Setting Transparency.

Sometime, you may want to look you form fancy, and a little bit transparent, to set the transparency of the form , we use the “Opacity” field of the form properties, by default it is set to 100%. You can set it you any values below 100% as per your needs.

I am changing the opacity of the form to 50%

Now run the file and you can see how transparent our form became.

Keep your form always to the top.

If you want to keep your GUI form, always on the top of the other windows, change the “Top Most” value to “false” to ”true”.

Changing form background.

Changing background colour.

To change the background colour for the form, click on “BackColor” under “Appearance” tab and and choose the colour which you like to have in you form.

Using image as background.

We can also use the image as background, , under “appearance” tab, click on “BackgroundImage”, and click on browse icon, and select the image which you want to use as background image.

Choose the image and click on “Open”

Now you can see that background image is set, and you can also set the “background image layout” to “Tile,Center,Stretch,zoom” by clicking on “BackgroundImageLayout” field properties.

That’s all for today. See you in next post.

Regards

Aman Dhally

     

Part–3 : PowerShell and DHCP : Configuring the DHCP Scope DHCP Server

 

 

Part – 1 : PowerShell and DHCP : Installing DHCP Server Role on Server 2012

Part – 2 :PowerShell and DHCP : DHCP Post-Install Configuration

 

 

In my previous post, we do the Post-Install configuration task for the DHCP Server.  Now it’s time to configure the DHCP Sever Scope. We can going to do the below configuration.

Configuration.

 

DHCP Configuration
Name	ID
IP Address Scope		192.168.1.100	192.168.1.200
DNS Server	6
Gateway	3	192.168.1.99
Domain Name	15	Amandhally.net
Subnet Mask		255.255.255.0

 

We configure our DHCP server to give us the automatic IP Address from Range 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.200.  Subnet mask  is “255.255.255.0” our Gateway’s IP Address is 192.168.1.99 and the IP Address of our DNS Server is “192.168.1.99”, and as a domain name for DHCP IP, I am using amandhally.net.

Scope

 

Before setting scopes, I want to bind the specific LAN card for DHCP Server ( as I have 2 LAN cards on my server), I don’t want to run DHCP server service on all of My LAN Cards,  to do that, I can use “Set-DhcpServerv4Binding” cmdlet.

You can see I have 2 Ethernet cards on my machine, and I want to run the DHCP server on the LAN card named as “for_dhcp”.  

Note: I renamed this LAN card manually, from “Local Area Network” to “for_dhcp”.

Now run the below command.

Set-DhcpServerv4Binding -InterfaceAlias "for_dhcp" -BindingState $true

 

Once it done, let cross check it by running the Get-DhcpServerv4Binding cmdlet.

 

Perfect, the Ethernet is bind.

 

Setting Scope.

 

Now, we have to set a scope for the DHCP Server, so that he can start giving us the IP addresses.

$nameScope = 'DHCP Delhi'

$startIP = '192.168.1.100'

$endIP = '192.168.1.200'

$subnetMask = '255.255.255.0'

For my ease, I set my settings is variable, so that is easy to change later on {idea for scripting } , and save them as a script file for later use.

Above, I am setting the name of the scope to “DHCP Delhi” and the DHCP server start leasing the IP Address from “192.168.1.100” to end IP address of “192.168.1.200”. and my subnet mask will be “255.255.255.0”.

We have to set all of above using the “Add-DhcpServerv4Scope” cmdlet.

Now, Once you set the variable, run the below command. By using –State parameter to True, we are making this scope active.

Add-DhcpServerv4Scope -Name $nameScope -StartRange $startIP -EndRange $endIP -SubnetMask $subnetMask -State Active

Or

Add-DhcpServerv4Scope -Name 'DHCP Delhi'-StartRange '192.168.1.100' -EndRange $'192.168.1.200' -SubnetMask '255.255.255.0'-State Active

 

Once the above command run successfully, open your DHCP Server Manager and you can see that we have a new scope and that scope it Active.

 

Even our DHCP Sever is started giving the address to other laptop on the network too.

 

And I run Ipconfig /release and then Ipconfig /renew on another laptop and he gets the IP address from our server too.

 

Now, when you open the console, you can see our DHCP Server has given 2 ips to the computers.

Great J Isnt’

 

Till, now , we are successfully able to get the IP address on client system from our DHCP Server, But we won’t able to connect to Internet or other services, until we configure the Router and DNS options in the DHCP Server,

In our next blog post we are going to do that.

See you in my next blog post.

 

 

Regards

Aman Dhally