PowerShell Team
Automating the world one-liner at a time…
Latest posts
Leveraging PowerShell Semantics to do More with Less
Brad Wilson – the .NET Guy recently posted a set of scripts showing how to drive TortoiseSVN from PowerShell. I thought I would use one of these to highlight how you can leverage the PowerShell semantics to do more with less code. PowerShell is provides Shell semantics and sometimes allows you to ask for more formal, programming, semantics. Specifically, if you ask for a variable that does not exist – PowerShell does not consider that an error. In the same token, if you ask for a PROPERTY of a variable and that property does not exist, that is not an error either. PowerShell doesn't complain – we give you a n...
“Windows PowerShell in Action” has been released…
Since a lot of people have been asking about it, yes - my book "Windows PowerShell in Action" is finally in stock and available on-line from http://amazon.com , http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ as well as directly from the publisher http://manning.com/powershell . It should be available in the store at Barnes and Noble and Borders later this week. Thanks for everyone's patience. There are a couple of short reviews on Amazon, a quite entertaining one on the Barnes and Noble site: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781932394900&itm=1 and a slightly longer one at: htt...
Execution Policy and Vista
Some of you may be getting an error when trying to set the execution policy on a new install of Windows PowerShell in Vista: PS C:\Users\leonard> Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestrictedSet-ExecutionPolicy : Access to the registry key 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell' is denied.At line:1 char:20+ Set-ExecutionPolicy <<<< unrestricted This behavior is by design. As a system-wide default that affects all users, the ExecutionPolicy is stored in the HKLM registry hive. PowerShell users on XP and Windows Server 2003 likely didn't see this as most use...
It’s All about Economics
There is a cool blog over on Windows Live Spaces called PowerShell for Testers. This has a bunch of great technical meat around script testing and testing using scripts. The most recent entry is on Lowering the Cost of Test Automation which makes the case the PowerShell excels at lowering the cost of test automation. I'm very pleased to see this because I strongly believe that at the end of the day, it's all about economics. My argument is that there are lots of great technologies but that technologies that matter and endure are those technologies which yield an economic advantage. I like to boast that every ...
Port 25 interview with Bruce Payette
Port 25 recently interviewed Bruce Payette. Bruce is one of the founding members of the team, is the development lead responsible for the PowerShell language, and is the author if the soon to be released PowerShell in Action from Manning Press. I think you'll find this interview very worthwhile. Check it out at: http://port25.technet.com/archive/2007/02/08/powershell-in-action-hank-interviews-bruce-payette.aspx Cheers! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]|Windows PowerShell/MMC ArchitectVisit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShellVisit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www....
PowerShell Tip: How to “shift” arrays…
It's fairly common in scripts to extract the first element out of an array then "shift" the remaining elements. Perl has a special shift operator for doing this as do many of the UNIX shells. PowerShell, however, doesn't have a shift operator built-in. So how do we shift arrays in PowerShell? Well – we could do it the brute force way and simply copy all of the elements after the first one but that sounds like too much work. A way to make it a bit easier is to use the range operator ('..') and array slices as shown: $first = $oldArray[0] $oldArray = $oldArray[1 .. ($oldArray.count-1)] But that's...
Processing text, files and XML
Manning Press was generous enough to put another chapter of Bruce Payette's Book PowerShell in Action book online. Presumably you'll read it and become convinced that you must buy the book in its entirety. Whatever the motivation – we all get a great free chapter on Processing text, files and XML. I was honored to be offered the opportunity of writing the forward. You can read that online as well. Enjoy! Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]Windows PowerShell/MMC ArchitectVisit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShellVisit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/techne...
Payette Podcast
Superstar Scott Hanselman interviewing superstar Bruce Payette – does it get any better? Bruce is a dev lead on PowerShell and author of Windows PowerShell in Action. Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]Windows PowerShell/MMC ArchitectVisit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShellVisit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
PowerShell Benefits Over COM Scripting
On an internal email thread, someone asked Vivek Sharma why they should implement PowerShell. They knew that PowerShell provided scripting but they had a COM interface which already gave them scripting so the question was – what, if any, were the additional benefits to doing PowerShell. Vivek gave a great answer that I thought I would share with you: Any guesses why I'm a charter member of the Vivek Sharma fan club? The Exchange team totally got PowerShell when other people looked at us like we had a rat's tail hanging out of our mouths. They are a high IQ team. Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]Windows PowerShell/MMC ...