Live PowerShell With Karl Prosser

I’ve always liked the fact that I can extend PowerShell, whether its just a little bit of syntax here or there, or a full blown DSL, and end up with something that is still naturally powershelly. Jaykul (Joel Bennet) has really used PowerShell in such a way. really making something that is pithy, follows a DRY philosophy, and is METAPROGRAMMING on two levels (the auto generation of the PowerShell functions and parameters, and of course the XAML). Its not only a beautiful example of PowerShell as a DSL, but also ultimately useful. I really think it has the potential to become the tcl/tk of PowerShell and the primary admin GUI scripting framework. I’m so impressed with it, we at ShellTools are definitely going to adjust our PowerShell WPF designer to support Boots. Boots is also now a codeplex project

Below is an example of the script, and a few screenshots and videos from Jaykul’s blog.

Boots {
   StackPanel -Margin 10 {
      TextBlock "The Question" -FontSize 42 -FontWeight Bold -Foreground "#FF0088"
      TextBlock -FontSize 24 {
         Hyperlink {
            Bold "Q. "
            "Can PowerBoots do async threads?"
         } -NavigateUri " " -On_RequestNavigate { $global:Answer[0].Visibility = "Visible" }
      }
      TextBlock -FontSize 16 {
         Span "A. " -FontSize 24 -FontWeight Bold
         "Oh yes we can!"
      } -OV global:Answer -Visibility Collapsed
   }
} 

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When we were selling PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShell Plus we used a standard shopping cart that we managed ourselves, generated license files with our own code, and emailed the customer. Managing these orders took a fair bit of time, but the biggest problem was often the emails that contained the purchased keys etc, didn’t get through. They got caught in spam filters and what not. It took A LOT OF EFFORT to manage these failures, and then when we sent out updates to our customers, because they were all sent out at the same time, services like hotmail thought they were spam and they never got through. This of course wasted our time as a vendor whose speciality is software, and frustrated our customers and wasted their time, and to those affected customers made us seem that we weren’t doing support or communicating with them, or even worse ripping them off.

So with us soon bringing Portable PowerShell to the market (as well as some other products including an exchange pop connector product) we want something better. Something that is less frustrating, that we don’t have to worry about building the sales software infrastructure or PCI stuff, something that just works well, is good value for money, is good for the customer etc. I know there must be untold services you there, that are tried and true and proven their worth to small software ISVs so we are asking for some suggestions.

Thanks in Advance,

Karl