One of my goals for the next six months was to contribute to an open source project and I think I’ve chosen one. I downloaded and installed the PowerShell Community Extensions (a.k.a. pscx) from codeplex a while ago, but I just now got around to really tinkering with the cmdLets and reviewing the source code and scripts. I have to say [...]
Browsing Posts published in July, 2007
Anything that can be done with ADO.NET is possible in PowerShell through a call to Assembly::Load and the New-Object cmdLet, but that doesn’t mean that the resulting code will seem very shell-like or practical. Two approaches to database access that definitely do seem compelling to me, however, are the sample SQL Provider recently demoed by the PowerShell team and Dan Sullivan’s PowerSMO script, which is really just a [...]
This weekend I completed my 10th marathon/ultra marathon in Lake Okoboji in Nebraska . That makes nine states in my quest to join the 50 state club, which requires you to run a marathon in each state. I picked this goal mostly because it gives me a good excuse to travel around to some places I probably wouldn’t have otherwise seen and it [...]
The more I work with powershell, the more I start seeing everything that lives on the computer as part of a giant database that I can query. When used in conjunction with the pipeline and get-member -type property to discover the available properties on an object, the where-object, sort-object, select-object, and group-object cmdlets can be strung together [...]
I’m doing some work now on an internal web application where I had to logon with an external test account before I could do anything. That got old fast, so I created a powershell script file to automatically launch IE, input the username and password, and click the submit button. I originally tried to do this with WatiN, [...]
I just heard about Justice Gray‘s blog challenge from the latest episode of Hanselminutes while running today. Although I think his plan to read one developer book a week for the next six months is rather insane, I agree with the premise that setting specific goals publicly is probably the best way to hold yourself accountable. Here are [...]
Here is a good joke to play on one of your developer buddies if they have powershell and SQL Server installed on their local machines and you have sa rights on the SQL Server for whatever reason (former debugging help, open environment between developers, blank sa password, or mad hacker skills on your part). Wait [...]
It appears as though we will have a new version of SQL Server 2008 next February 27th. This is well ahead of what my sarcastically titled post on SQL Server 2008 predicted. So much for my career as a technical psychic… It will also be the launch for Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Server 2008. That should be one [...]
I’ve been impressed by the attention paid to discoverabiltiy in powershell, which has allowed me to quite a bit of learning without ever leaving the command line. Here are a few of my favorite features: Guessing - This may seem strange to list as the number one discoverability feature, but I think the Powershell design team did an [...]
A good friend of mine just sent me an email razzing me about my blog. Besides being a current running and drinking buddy, he also happens to be former project manager of mine who put some time in on the early stages of a large waterfall project that I reminisced about in a previous post. He gave me [...]
