Synaptic Misfirings: PowerShell

PowerShell v2.0 is out in CTP form

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 07:05:11 GMT

The CTP of PowerShell v2.0 is out (actually it was out yesterday) and it is quite frankly super cool: Background Jobs, Remote Scripting the list goes on and on. Get the low down here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/11/06/what-s-new-in-ctp-of-powershell-2-0.aspx

Now we just need Bruce Payette to update his definitive 'PowerShell In Action' book.

PowerShell V2.0 CTP due next week.

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:05:47 GMT

Awesome news to go into the weekend on:

http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/11/02/ctp-ctp-beta.aspx

Can't wait to see what in there. Personally speaking I'd like to see the ability to (easily) write event handlers in PowerShell scripts, pref. by just writing a lambda (ScriptBlock) inline. Second up would be foreground/background processes a-la *nix shells. I want to be able to start a blocking command line and then put it away and enter another command - all from a prompt.

Coolest PowerShell add-on so far...

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 20:10:19 GMT

If you love PowerShell then you need to stop what you're doing immediately and check this out...

http://www.powershell.com/plus/

The appropriate phrase here I think is: Cool As F*ck! :-)

Make Consolas the default PowerShell font.

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 23:53:08 GMT

One of the many nice things about Live Spaces is that owners get to see what search terms brought people to their blogs. Not a week goes by that I don't see someone reaching my blog by searching for "Consolas" and "PowerShell". So here's a suggestion Microsoft: add Consolas font support as an out-of-the-box option in PowerShell without requiring your users to "hack" it in. The combination of the two is so lovely it should be up front and center. Heck I'd suggest making Consolas the default font in PowerShell, subject to detecting a ClearType compatible display at install time. By way of supporting meta data for this claim, no one has hit my blog using "Comic Sans" and "PowerShell" (not a pleasant thought).

PowerShellLanguage plug-in for Reflector

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 04:26:53 GMT

Doh! Somehow I missed this one first time around. There's a neat plug-in for Lutz Roeder's essential Reflector tool (just in case you haven't seen Reflector, Lutz's tool is to .NET dev what SysInternal's Process Explorer is to Windows, i.e. essential).

http://www.codeplex.com/reflectoraddins/Wiki/View.aspx?title=PowerShellLanguage

Now what I'd really like to see is a F# language plug-in - how neat would that be! :-)

Love PowerShell? Watch video!

Wed, 23 May 2007 05:58:50 GMT

Honestly Jeffrey Snover and Bruce Payette deserve a higher profile in the dev community than I think they currently have - certainly I'd group them in with Anders Hejlsberg, Don Syme, Jim Hugunin and Wes Dyer as folks who you just stop whatever you're doing to listen to when they have something to say. The latest PowerShell video up on Channel 9 is no exception:

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=309510

Inspiring and educational stuff. Totally worth your time watching (or at the very least listening to).

How to play nicely at the command line...

Thu, 17 May 2007 18:17:29 GMT

Mouse centric developers should look away now... If you write small comman line tools or even just little "run once" applets then Microsoft's new "Command Line Standard" document might be of interest:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/winpsh/cmdline_std.mspx

I feel strongly that its behove of all true developers to embrace efforts like the above, WPF is glorious - but a true coding geek lives at the eval prompt. That's not to denigrate folks who mostly use the design surfaces in Visual Studio - goodness knows I'm dying to get my hands on a legit RTM copy of Expression Blend - but as far as I'm concerned the mouse is for layout. This is a big part of why I generally dispise most DHTML based web apps, generally speaking their support for keyboard navigation sucks in comparison to their "rich client" desktop versions.

Great Jeffery Snover PowerShell pod cast interview.

Thu, 10 May 2007 05:10:34 GMT

Head over to:

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/podcasts/microsofts_power_play.html

to listen to Jeffery Snover on PowerShell. The audio quality isn't great - but the content is good (so not unlike XBOX 360 then ;-) To get back on track, I live in the Visual Studio Command Window a lot of the time and can't help thinking how wonderful it would be if Visual Studio Miami would host PowerShell as its Command Window language - with cmdlets to hook into the IDE and msbuild.

It's amazing to me how many very smart people I know who are effectively in PowerShell denial mode. It's almost akin to the attitude some of these devs had back when C# made its first serious frontal attack on C++ on Windows. Don't get left behind folks, controlling such things as the UI-less skew of Longhorn Server using cmd.exe and .vbs files is going to suck big time. PowerShell is inevitable, but more to the point it's liberating and empowering. Roll on PowerShell 1.1.

Here's my cheeky throw down to any Windows developer who's not super excited by PowerShell, read chapter 8 "Scriptblocks and Objects" of Bruce's "PowerShell In Action" and if that doesn't cause all manner of little lights to go on in your head then you don't deserve C# 3, LINQ, the DLR or even C++ 0x with its limited lambda support. In fact you should probably consider a career in management because programming languages and process automation environments are only going to become more and more like this.

Or alternatively, here's my dev sales pitch: If as a developer you grew up in the 8 bit era where the power-on ROM BASIC interpreter effectively was the command line then in many ways PowerShell is akin to that. PowerShell is not just a "boring" admin tool, for developers it is nothing less than .NET at the command line. In so many ways as a developer PowerShell feels like like coming home...

Honestly I consider myself to be late to the party with regard to so much of this (I've eaten a lot of humble pie in my reading adventures over the past year). Maybe the wider community was like this when Objects where the new thing and folks believed that procedures where The One True Way. Here's some very interesting and not unconnected food for thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-whorf

Liberating and empowering...

Jeffrey Snover posts some PowerShell internal design docs!

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 05:42:33 GMT

OK, this is going to be a shameless Microsoft fan boy posting... Jeffrey Snover has just made available a public version of the "Monad Manifesto" document. If you want to know how PowerShell was originally envisaged back in 2002 and where it's likely to be going in the future then this is the place to find it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/03/19/monad-manifesto-the-origin-of-windows-powershell.aspx

Now clearly Microsoft does not exist in isolation but it has to be acknowledged that they are most certainly not the Microsoft I remember when I first started programming professionally almost 12 years ago now. Resources like Microsoft Research, the MSDN blogs and Channel 9 are fantastic, I would go further and say that they are unparalleled in this industry. It would be all to easy to be cynical and say that Microsoft has been forced to be open however any *nix developer who takes a few hours to wonder around these sites and blogs should quickly realise that rather than being the product of some diabolical marketing machine they are populated by passionate and sincere engineers and research scientists creating, posting, publishing (in other words 'sharing' their thinking and insights - and in so doing often publicly discussing past mistakes and false turns). This is why those deeply stupid iSheep advertisments that Apple puts out really irritate, it's very easy to be funny when you're talking about a competitor from 10+ years ago and even then only telling half truths.

I am often teased, perhaps with justification, for my apparent blind fan boy devotion to MS - but this is not so (heck, I should be a PlayStatation 3 owner this Friday: the XBOX 360 is great, it truly is, but it's the games I'm interested in and the best games will be on both platforms). Professionally however I am currently first and foremost a software developer and as such will shamelessly go wherever the best languages, tools and innovation are to be found. Right now, and lets be honest for the foreseeable future, that place is Windows.

Does Microsoft get it right all the time? Of course they don't, but bleating on about their mistakes constitutes lazy journalism and 'un-thinking' (sic). A large percentage of my TV / movie associated friends and family own Apple computers and the truth is they crash, frequently. I know, shocking news, but it does happen...

PowerShell Community Extensions, form an orderly queue please...

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 07:35:14 GMT

It's great to see folks really get behind PowerShell. I've already completely moved my build environment shells over to it, and in so doing falling in love with the build in XML support. Hmm XML on the command line + .msbuild files, join the dots :-)

Head over to Keith Hills blog (well worth subscribing to IMO) for the news on the PowerShell Community Extensions.

http://www.codeplex.com/PowerShellCX/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx

Here's what I'd love to develop given some free time. I'd like a dockable PowerShell window in Visual Studio 2005 / Orcas. However rather than just a better version of the existing cmd.exe VS window plug-in, what about adding this into the deal:

1. Have a PS drive provider that represents your loaded VS solution.

2. Bring the VS object model right into the PS environment.

This would be so cool. It bugs the heck out of me that VS puts this huge layer of bubble wrap over MSBuild, but if we could, within the VS environment reach in there any tweak the heck out of both the IDE and MSBuild (without having to go down the Alt+F11 route), that'd be way cool.

Last night I was in the office late helping some chap from our client support team, he's a big *nix fan (you know the type, removes IE and installs 'Fox). We mstsc'd over to my machine to build our XML extraction DLL and in so doing he saw PowerShell... sold.

Dead tree version of "PowerShell In Action" arrived.

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 21:52:21 GMT

No more having reading to read the PDF version (other than it being always to hand on my memory stick, my £5/2GB memory stick - thank you Lee!), as the dead tree edition Bruce Payette's definitive guide to PowerShell turned up today from Amazon. I don't know if Bruce offered this book to any other publishers but Manning have what I now suspect is going to turn out to be the K&R of PowerShell on their hands.

This bears repeating: If as a developer on Windows you have any contact with .NET 2 or greater, BUY THIS BOOK!

I just finished reading the chapter on Scriptblocks, aka lambdas this evening and spent a happy hour or two working through the exercises to add new key words to the language, add support for classes etc. Scriptblocks are just so much fun, I challenge any breathing developer to read chapter 8 "Scriptblocks and objects" and not come away with a big metaprogramming-sh*t-eating grin on their face. It's so damn powerful (like the name) and the implementation is so beautifully thought out, and under pinning it all is the .NET BCL we know and love.

Using the Consolas font with PowerShell

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 09:43:26 GMT

If you're using PowerShell (read: if you're a developer) then you might be interested in this tip which lets you use the lovely Consolas font (my default font in Visual Studio 2005) within your PowerShell window. Personally speaking I find Consolas 16 works well with the default PowerShell console size (i.e. not the old cmd.exe console dimensions). 16 seems to form a sweet spot between using enough pixels per character to be easy on the eye vs. displaying a decent chunk of information without scrolling. Here's the link...

http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2006/10/16/Windows-PowerShell-Font-Customization.aspx

Try it, your eyes will thank you.

PowerShell interview with Bruce Payette

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 05:50:59 GMT

IDEs are wonderful and its a fact that DevEnv pretty much is my desktop but I still do a lot of my dev related activities at the command line. It's very rarely that I hit Windows-E to summon Explorer. Here's a great interview with Bruce Payette one of the uber brains behind PowerShell. Don't mistake PowerShell as purely an admin tool, yes it is that, but it's also an incredible scripting language over a .NET BCL view of your computer / network.

It's really worth getting into and whilst the syntax is very different (but so-so much more consistent) from cmd.exe you'll find that the alias: drive ships with aliases like "dir", "pushd" etc to ease the transition. Personally I recommend just diving in and learning to think in terms of "get-childitem" (or "gci") etc. Trust me, as a .NET developer just try this:

1. Start PowerShell.

2. Type "dir" (an alias for "get-childitem)

3. Type "get-childitem | get-member"

4. Type "get-process" (are you noticing a pattern yet?)

5. Type "get-process | get-member"

At this point if you've spent more than a couple of days in .NET country you'll be thinking "that looks an awful lot like System.Diagnostics.Process". Well it is :-) How about command line scripts that create and display WinForms UI? And I don't just mean "MessageBox". If it's a .NET object then you can reach it and manipulate it and "mix it up" with your files, directory structures, services and servers etc. Wonderful, mind expanding and good old fashioned fun.

Small example, I often need to "rebase" my environment to clear out all instances of our software before going round a debugging loop again. Rather than hunting through Process Explorer (everyone's using MS-Sys Internals "Process Explorer" these days right?) I can just type:

get-process | where { $_.company -eq "sungard adaptiv" } | stop-process

Yes, you just piped objects there, not text. Interested yet? Anyway, enough, here's Bruce Payette who explains it all far more elegantly....

http://port25.technet.com/archive/2007/02/08/powershell-in-action-hank-interviews-bruce-payette.aspx

You can even embed PowerShell as a non visual component (it's not just a console). Why would you want to? Well PowerShell has XML as a native type. PowerShell has beautiful array slicing syntax.

PowerShell for Windows Vista is out! :-)

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:16:01 GMT

Now I have seriously missed PowerShell on Vista (since I moved up to Vista RTM everywhere PowerShell has been the only thing I've missed from my old XP box). You couldn't install the Vista RC1 build of PowerShell on Vista RTM, so I've been stuck with cmd.exe until this evening. PowerShell is finally available for Vista RTM.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C6EF4735-C7DE-46A2-997A-EA58FDFCBA63&displaylang=en

No self respecting managed developer can afford not to learn this wonderful tool. I'd really like to see the Windows SDK in future shipping .ps versions of the various build environment .cmd scripts they ship today. Heck, PowerShell should be installed as part of the Windows SDK from now on, in the same way FxCop is today.

It's not just for developers, if you're business is monitoring servers, networks, databases or such and are running Vista then you need to take a look at Power Gadgets from some seriously useful SideBar eye candy. This stuff uses PowerShell under the hood, so you can easily hook up all those perf keys or WMI events.

http://www.powergadgets.com/

Almost 6 years down the road from NGWS and .NET is really beginning to become so much more than the sum of its parts. Its such an excellent time to be a managed developer! I miss C++ and COM these days the same way I miss my 68000 macro assembler on my ATARI STM (i.e. hardly at all). I vividly recall installing NGWS at CSFB, taking my first look at C#, IL and the CLR and thinking: "Don't make me go back... please!" :-)