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’ »
I’m not much on New Year’s resolutions but I’ve seen a few people post their PowerShell-related goals and thought I’d jump on that bandwagon. Here are a few things I want to get accomplished this year: 1. 50 blog posts 2. New release of SQLPSX 3. Separate release of ADOLIB 4. Second book (maybe in …
Early this year I was contacted by Packt Publishing to see if I had any interest in writing a PowerShell book. After I got up off the floor and thought about it a bit, I decided that it was something I wanted to do. I have spent the majority of the year struggling with my …
Continue reading ‘Packt’s $5 eBook Bonanza and what I’ve been doing all year’ »
At work, I have a library of modules stored on a network share. In order to make things work well when I’m not on the network, I include the network share in my PSModulePath, but later in the PSModulePath I point to a local copy of the library. Since installing the 5.0 preview (which I …
Ok…that’s a strange title, but let me finish before you decide its lame. (On a side note, I’m a dad, so my humor tends to run in that direction naturally). I see lots of examples in books and on the web about how to use pipeline input to functions. I’m not talking about how to …
Continue reading ‘It’s 10 O’Clock. Do you know where your servers are?’ »
It has been said that you can write BASIC code in any language. When I look at PowerShell code, I tend to see a lot of code that looks like transplanted C# code. It’s easy to get confused sometimes, since C# and PowerShell syntax are similar, and when you are dealing with .NET framework objects …
Before I cover this specific code smell, I should probably explain one thing. The presence of code smells doesn’t necessarily mean that the code in question isn’t functional. In the example I gave last time (the extra long method), there’s no reason to think that just because a method is a thousand lines long that …
Continue reading ‘PowerShell-Specific Code Smells: Building output using +=’ »
A code smell is something you find in source code that may indicate that there’s something wrong with the code. For instance, seeing a function that is over a thousand lines gives you a clue that something is probably wrong even without looking at the specific code in question. You could think of code smells …
You’ve probably been told all your life that you should learn from your mistakes. I agree with this statement, but I prefer always to learn from other people’s mistakes. In this post, I’ll give you an opportunity to learn a bit more about PowerShell by watching me mess up. What a deal! I was helping …
One of my earliest (posts was about implementing an “identity function” in PowerShell to assist in typing lists of strings without bothering with commas. The function I presented was this: I recently saw (in a Scripting Games entry) that you don’t need to define your own function for this. write-output works just fine. For example: …
Continue reading ‘PowerShell Identity Function (revisted)’ »
