Generating your own custom calendar or event invites in the iCal (vCalendar) format is pretty easy, once you’ve read the 140+ page spec.
Actually, it’s a pretty complex but flexible way to build schedule items. Just think about the possibly combinations that exist when you create a new meeting request or appointment in Outlook or your preferred calendar application. You get recurrences, descriptions, summaries, invitees, location, start time, end time, all-day…. and the list goes on and on.
For this example, we’ll keep it simple and walk through building a function for an event with a yearly recurrence; something like a birthday or an anniversary.
The first part of this function is going to put together some of variables for building out the ICS file. In this case, the function is going to ask for input for all the fields. To truly automate, you’ll want to suck this information in from a file or another datasource since you’ll want to minimize the user intervention.
function CreateNewEvent {
# Custom date formats that we want to use
$longDateFormat = "yyyyMMddTHHmmssZ"
$dateFormat = "yyyyMMdd"
# Prompt the user for the start date in a specific format
$startDate = Read-Host -Prompt 'Enter the start date of the event in the format "yyyymmdd"'
# Give the event a name specified by the user
$eventSubject = Read-Host -Prompt 'Enter the event subject'
# This field is optional, but let's ask for the details (description)
$eventDesc = Read-Host -Prompt 'Enter the event description summary (optional)'
# Provide location information (also optional)
$eventLocation = Read-Host -Prompt 'Enter the event location (optional)'
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