That will throw an error: “Cannot retrieve the dynamic parameters for the cmdlet. The provider does not support the use of credentials. Perform the operation again without specifying credentials.”

Impersonation

To solve this problem at work, I’ve written an impersonation module. It basically has two methods: Push-ImpersonationContext and Pop-ImpersonationContext. There is one catch: you need to be running in single-threaded apartment mode for it to work, because the impersonation only affects the current thread (if you’re not running PowerShell.exe -STA, your commands execute on a thread pool, so you never know from one to the next what thread you’ll be on). In any case, you use it like this:

It’s really very simple, and works great for when you need to access resources across multiple domains. Particularly files, for which PowerShell doesn’t support alternate credentials at all. Anyway the module code is on PoshCode, save it to your Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\Impersonation\Impersonation.psm1 and use Import-Module Impersonation to load it. Here you go:

• Rendering Tier 0 No graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is less than version 7.0.
• Rendering Tier 1 Partial graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is greater than or equal to version 7.0, and lesser than version 9.0.

• Rendering Tier 2 Most graphics features use graphics hardware acceleration. The DirectX version level is greater than or equal to version 9.0.

Shift-Left 1, via Wikipedia

The problem is that in PowerShell, getting the “high-order word” of an integer is a little annoying, because the normal way to do that is to right-shift the integer to throw away the low-order word … and PowerShell is missing the shift operators. Why? I don’t know. In any case, I figured, well, I’ll just write it as a function with a call out to C# to make my life simpler. The one catch is that the Add-Type cmdlet that lets you inject C# classes is new in PowerShell 2.0, so if you want to use this script in PowerShell 1.0 you need to get the New-Type function from PoshCode and replace Add-Type with New-Type in the script.

I wrote a simple little static C# class to actually do the shifting, and then a pair of functions: Shift-Left and Shift-Right which can even work in the pipeline. NOTE: it assume the values are passed in by index, so when you’re in the pipeline it should only have one parameter ($x) which will be the shift count, but when you’re passing both as parameters to the function, $y is the shift count.