One thing I’ve always been impressed about with PowerShell is the vibrant community. In this post, I will outline several ways to get involved in the PowerShell community, starting with some really easy ones. Starting Small You don’t have to be an expert to be part of the community, in fact if you’re reading this, …
So back in January I set out a list of PowerShell goals for the year. It’s not over yet, but I thought I’d see how well I did on those goals. 1. 50 blog posts I knew this one was ambitious, but I figured one post per week should be manageable. I’ve been close to …
Code Smells I’ve mentioned code smells in this blog before, but to recap, a code smell is a warning sign that you might be looking at bad code (for some value of bad). Code smells are more like red flags than errors. Some classic example of code smells are very long functions, lots of global variables, …
Continue reading ‘PowerShell Code Smell: Invoke-Expression (and some suggestions)’ »
I love the ISE. I’ve used other “environments”, but always end up using the good old ISE. I do use the awesome ISESteroids module by Tobias Weltner (powertheshell.com), but most of the time you can find me in the unadorned, vanilla ISE. With that bit of disclaimer out of the way, there is something that …
Continue reading ‘The Two Faces of the ISE Run Button (and a bit of bonus evil)’ »
I’ve realized that in my explanations of Adolib and POSH_Ado, I left something important out. Why in the world am I spending all of this time and effort writing database access modules when there are already tools out there (SQLPS, for instance) which work. The simple answer is SQLPS is not good enough for several …
One of my most popular answers on StackOverflow is also one which has a tiny bit of controversy. It involves how to “hide” helper functions in a module in order to keep them from being exported. Export-ModuleMember Details In case you’re unfamiliar with how exporting functions from a module works, here are the basic rules: …
Continue reading ‘Breaking the rules with helper functions’ »
Looking at some of the solutions to the July scripting games problems (here) I noticed that several of them used abbreviations for parameter names. For instance: I understand that this is a competition of sorts and that part of the challenge is to get a solution with the smallest number of characters, but I realized …
Continue reading ‘Quick Tip – Avoid abbreviating parameter names’ »
I’m definitely guilty of using PowerShell in situations where it’s not the best answer. Some of that is curiosity (can I make it work) and some of it is stubbornness (I bet I can make it work). But I never want to give the impression that PowerShell is “fixing” my problems. For instance, if you …
Continue reading ‘PowerShell will not fix all of your problems’ »
After a presentation about PowerShell at a recent user group meeting, one of the attendees asked, in effect, why he should bother learning PowerShell. He has been in IT for a long time and has seen lots of different approaches to automation. I was somewhat taken aback. I expected these kinds of questions 5 years …
I’ve seen several posts on PowerShell best practices, and even read Ed Wilson’s book on the subject. There is some commonality in the lists in the obvious places (verb-noun, output objects, format your code nicely), and some disagreement in other areas (code signing, for example). I also see a great amount of variation in use …
