TOOLS

So this post falls into the category of “How old where you when you found out…?” The question is answered “I was today years old” because that’s how the question usually works. This was one of those days.

I was listening to a recording of the bi-weekly “Microsoft 365 Developer SIG community call,” which happens on the 4th Thursday of every month. (The Microsoft 365 Platform community calls are all worth checking out and each of them is recorded and then uploaded to Youtube within 24 hours of the live event. Find out more info here: aka.ms/m365pnp) Part of the call was a demo by MVP Chris Kent on custom formatting in lists and he was showing how to use emojis in the formatting. Again, his demos are “must see TV,” both for content and entertainment value.

As the development pendulum has swung back to the “front end,” I find a majority of my time in VS Code. Back in the early days of VS Code, I missed the rich toolset of Visual Studio, but as I became more comfortable with the combination of command line and graphical interfaces in VS Code, as well as the explosion of awesome extensions for VS Code, I found myself opening Visual Studio less and less. (Honestly, when I open Visual Studio these days, it’s because the icon is next to VS Code in my taskbar and I accidentally click the wrong one. As long as it’s open, I apply the latest updates and close it back down.)

I recently found myself in a situation on a client’s device where I needed to remove an application, but I was not a local administrator on the device. After evaluating options (like the slow WMI client), I turned to PowerShell. PowerShell provides a simple and fast way to search for and uninstall MSI-installed applications.

Skip to the code!

After exploring a few options, including the glacially slow WMI client, I decided to turn to my old friend PowerShell. And voilà! PowerShell provides a simple and fast way to search for and remove applications.