Adam the Automator

In PowerShell, when you need to show a variable’s value in a string you typically just add the variable along with some other text inside of a string with double quotes.

This is perfectly fine if $serverName has a value. But what if this is part of a larger script and you have various conditions that might set $serverName. This means that $serverName might not contain any value at all. At that point, your message just looks messed up.

The solution? Make it a habit of enclosing your variables inside of strings with simple brackets.

You can now clearly see that a variable should have been there but was not.

It’s a simple trick but it’s saved me so much troubleshooting time over the years. Now, it’s habit to enclose variables in brackets. In fact, I have a snippet that I use to simply type varb and it will automatically do it for me.