I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about “idiomatic PowerShell” since my last post and my thinking led me to an idea that I haven’t actually used, but seems like the kind of thing that people would do in PowerShell. If I were writing a script that needed to get a “bunch of things” from [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Discussion category.
PowerShell’s Problem with Return
I think that PowerShell is a fairly readable language, once you’re used to its unique features. Naming functions (cmdlets) with an embedded hyphen, using -eq instead of the equals sign (and similarly for other operators) and not using commas to delimit parameters in a function call (but using them in a method call) are all [...]
Verifying Automation
If you’re anything like me, you’ve been bitten by the PowerShell bug and are using it among other automation sources to make you life in IT much more enjoyable. If this is not the case…you need to get started! There’s no time like the present, and a PowerShell New Year’s resolution should be something to [...]
Happy (Belated) Anniversary!
I didn’t manage to post anything on the 1 year anniversary of powershellstation.com, but I did remember. I was hoping to have posted more, but all in all, it wasn’t a bad year. I have some plans for this year: Write a post or 2 about remoting Kill off the powershellworkbench project (I can’t stand writing [...]
The PowerShell Bug That Wasn’t, and More Package Management
Have you ever tracked down a bug, been confident that you had found the root of your problems, only to realize shortly afterwords that you missed it completely? What I posted yesterday as a bug in PowerShell (having to do with recursive functions, dot-sourcing, and parameters) seemed during my debugging session to clearly be a [...]
Package Management and a PowerShell Bug
UPDATE: I have worked out how the behavior described at the end of this post is not a bug, but in fact just PowerShell doing what it’s told. Don’t have time to explain right now, but I’ll write something up later today. I also worked out how to “fix” the behavior. For a long time [...]
An Overlooked Parameter
This isn’t so much a post as an extended pingback. This Post by Jeffrey Snover on the PowerShell Team Blog explains how to use the -expandproperty parameter of the select-object cmdlet. I had never noticed that parameter and was also annoyed by writing this all the time: get-something | foreach {$_.SomeProperty} It was an idiom [...]
Writing your own PowerShell Hosting App (Part 1. Introduction)
I’ve mentioned before that I use a homegrown PowerShell host in my work. I have been more than pleasantly surprised at how easy and how rewarding this is. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a few articles that have gotten me thinking about writing a series of blog posts about how to get started. [...]
A Handy Trick I’ve Started to Use a Lot
If you’re like me, you hate to do the same thing over and over. That’s what programming is for, right? To handle automating tedious procedures? Unfortunately, it’s not at all appropriate to run off and build an app every time you need to do the same thing 3 times. If you try that, you’ll have [...]
Is it just me? (Or does PowerShell remind you of SQL?)
When preparing a PowerShell training class for a group of DBAs, I realized that there were some parallels between basic SQL and basic PowerShell commands. A (very) basic SQL statement has the form: SELECT <COLUMNS> FROM <TABLE> WHERE <CONDITION> ORDER BY <EXPRESSION> I noticed that a very common idiom for PowerShell pipelines* was: <data source [...]
