Here is a Link to where i have the interactive demo

Here is a screenshot

and

Here is a Link to where i have the interactive demo
PowerShell

A PowerShell web front end that can talk to the backend using ShellTools PowerShell Job Server , or PoshBoard or PowerGui Pro. With intellisense data coming from your servers, as well as abilities to use Siverlight isolated storage for script repositories/snippets or get hook up to a web based service for that whether it be Evernote, google docs or such?

HTML
Imagine it as an altnerative editor for the SOURCE version, whether for your CMS, with CKeditor, WordPress or such? a nice editor, with rich features, and code completion?

Javascript
A javascript editor that runs real in the browser. where code completion is running against the real life objects you are working with. the ability to quickly run and prototype javascript right there and then, or maybe even include it as an optional interface inside a firefox plugin or firebug or such?

IronRuby , IronPython, Script for .Net , Jint and other DLR languages
With various techniques and gestalt bring other languages into the browser and actually enjoy the code sculpting process right there in the browser without a second class citizen experience typical of web editors. Also with IronRuby and the like you could have macros and all running right there and then and with

Here is a Link to where i have the interactive demo

Back in the Dotnet 4, VS.NET 2010 Beta days i threw together a PowerShell console host compiled against dotnet 4 but really didn’t do anything with it. It seems that there is a bit of demand for it. So here it is. You can download it and start using it.

It at least allows you to interact with dotnet 4 code in-process. Its not going to turn PowerShell into a dotnet 4.0 citizen as really PowerShell is in what I call “Dotnet 1.9″ style. Its going to be very awkward to interact with Dotnet 4 dynamic objects without some nice helpers but at least it IS possible.

Also I very much doubt that this will be able to be used as a remoting server. However you could have a dotnet 2, PS V2 runspace call this to do some processing. Tedious but at least possible.
Background jobs also aren’t going to run in Dotnet 4, though they possibly may if you manage to rename the original powershell.exe and put this one in its place. I know on windows 7 the ability to do is locked down, but it might be possible on other OSes.

All Command line options should work other than Console files.

Download NOW!!!

Notice the CLR version above?

Download NOW!!!

Just download it, and if with IE make sure you “unblock” the zip, then unzip it and run it anywhere you have PowerShell V2 installed. Enjoy.

Thanks to @jstangroome on twitter to helping motivate me get this out.

Karl Prosser / ShellTools LLC.

A new Beta of Portable PowerShell should be out by the end of the week that has ISE support and to celebrate we will open up the Beta group to another 100 users.

Go to http://groups.google.com/group/portable-powershell-beta to sign up to the google group. However be aware that the introduction words contain old info , and some bug in google groups is preventing me from updating it, however we’ll send out emails with the relevant information in it.

Here is a link to the Silverlight version of the Video, and to the WMV (95MB) version. The Video is about 12 minutes and audio doesn’t kick in for 30 seconds.

Would anybody like me to post the code to the examples i presented?

-Karl

Basically the trick is just to make a class that’s .tostring() returns a null, and then when you pass that to an api through powershell that takes a string powershell will convert the class to a string() thus calling your code that returns a null..

namespace testnullD
{
public class nulltest
{
public nulltest(){}
public override string ToString() {return null;}
}
}

Here is a complete example you can use.

$a = @"

using System;
namespace ClassLibrary1
{
#proof of concept
public static class Class1
{
public static string Foo(string value)
{
if (value == null)
    return "Special processing of null.";
else
    return "'" + value + "' has been processed.";
}
}
}
"@

$b = @"
using System;
namespace testnullD
{
public class nulltest
{
public nulltest(){}
public override string ToString() {return null;}
}
}
"@
add-type $a
add-type $b
$psnull = new-object testnullD.nulltest
add-type $a
[ClassLibrary1.Class1]::Foo($null)
[ClassLibrary1.Class1]::Foo($psnull)

I normally don’t get heated about things but the fiasco with the new iPhone developer terms of service has kept my attention for the last few weeks and I suppose it’s because I have skin in the game and like many have developed applications in other languages for the iPhone that until a few weeks ago were perfectly acceptable but now are barred with a few key presses of a lawyers keyboard.

As a caution I haven’t ventured into my iPhone developer portal to view the new terms of service since this fiasco began but here is the excellently crafted offensive clause as reported by the mainstream media.
**************************************************************
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
**************************************************************

Breaking Down 3.3.1

The above clause is very carefully worded. It bans a lot, more than just adobe flash. A large number of iPhone games are made in C# using a game engine called Unity 3d. There is a C# to native iPhone compiler called MonoTouch.(MonoTouch is where this affects me directly.)  I believe there are some ruby to native compilers and Pascal as well. The “originally written in” part is a killer because though these languages compile directly to native machine code, they could just as easily compile down to Objective-C . This also effectively bans any kind of metaprogramming techniques or code generation tools. (In fact I recently wanted to store data in source code and I used PowerShell on windows to generate the objective-C to include into my application, which could technically invalidate my objective-C app).

Also “the JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine”clause  could imply that novel uses  of JavaScript outside of the browser, such as with PhoneGap or Appcelerator Titanium which uses JavaScript not so much to control HTML but to bridge native COCOATOUCH GUI interfaces is banned also.

And the final clause prohibiting any “intermediary translation or compatibility layer” between the application code and the iPhone APIs , in its strictest sense would prohibit your own classes which wrap up some functionality for reuse, to any third party or open source library that makes reuse and certain functionality easier or more consistent (in the “real” or rather wider programming world this is VERY common”) and game engines (including C, C++) almost certainly always have a LARGE abstraction layer between the game code and the underlying platform.

I could go into detail now and rant about those clauses in depth right now, but I will resist and rather dig into Steve Job’s open letter ranting about Adobe and flash and try to break down the fallacies he portrays and deal with things as they really are. First of all I am not a flash fan boy. As a democoder who wrote optimized 3d assembly code and whose friends tried to succeed with “better” animation browser plugins but couldn’t compete with Flash’s pervasiveness I despised flash, yet I respect that its animation capabilities (putting video aside for now) are sufficient and better than the emerging HTML5 and it has a history and is established and successful for reasons good and bad.

Before we go into the “Flash on Mobile” or not argument lets separate two things which Steve Jobs has grouped together -Flash as a Browser Plugin versus the Flash “Packager” for Iphone.

Flash as we know it in a browser runs in a browser and has one set of content (SWF files) that runs the same on every platform. It can’t interact with the computer outside of its browser context, and it runs any programmatic behavior in interpreted action script (with interpreted code being SIGNIFICANTLY slower than compiled code (such as Objective-C or C++). Many of Steve’s argument against Flash and its performance and CPU usage here in the context of a mobile device are valid, albeit misdirected.

From what I understand mobile safari doesn’t even have a browser plugin model, and I DON’T THINK APPLE SHOULD HAVE TO MAKE ONE AND PROVIDE A WAY FOR FLASH TO WORK IN MOBILE SAFARI. However I don’t believe that apple should even be able to ban flash. If Adobe was to work with Opera’s Iphone Browser then that should be fair game. Maybe flash will run slow on it, and the experience wouldn’t be as good for video as H.264 on safari but it would be an option. The market should be able to choose. Also Adobe should even be able to take the open source Webkit engine and make their own browser plugin model and bring their own browser to the iPhone if they wish. Sure the browser may be slower and resemble more the browser experience on android but that should be their prerogative.

Anyhow the Packager for Iphone  in Adobe Creative Suite 5 is a totally different beast, and should be treated differently and most of Steve’s arguments don’t even apply to it technically. The packager for IPhone is more like a 3d game engine. It talks directly to the iPhone APIs (most likely the OpenGLES graphics libraries) for its UI and builds a UI on top of that will code most likely written in C++ that is as finely tuned and engineered for graphical performance as any game engine. Also unlike many existing iPhone games that have somehow managed to shirk an existing apple prohibition on interpreted languages (3.3.2) and use languages like LUA for their game logic , the flash packager, like MonoTouch, compiles its language into native assembly code that statically binds with the iphone libraries, the same as Objective-C does. This last part is very important and really nullifies any justification apple could legitimately have against the flash packager or tools like MonoTouch.

However even 3.3.2  is draconian and the market should be able to decide, and good developers can make applications in interpreted languages run well, and they should have the flexibility to be allowed to. Also in the case of games, game engines are finely tuned and well-engineered, so even if the game logic is written in a slow interpreted language 95+% of execution time isn’t spent there but rather inside the C++/assembler game engine and the 3D graphics drivers from the vendor. If game developers who focus on performance like a religion are able to with good engineering creatively use interpreted languages to be more productive in writing game logic then that innovation and productive toolset should be allowed, as should even the flash packager and other frameworks.

Addressing Steve Job’s open Letter

So let’s breakdown Steve’s misinformation in his Thoughts of Flash letter.

Open Vs Closed

First he brings up the Open versus Closed. Yes flash is proprietary but it’s much more open that the IphoneOS. Adobe doesn’t police who makes what to run on flash. Developers can make any type of flash animation, application of video that they please, and they don’t even have to use Adobe tools to do so. Its open enough, unlike IphoneOS , that third party tools such as Swish can produce Flash content, and even many metaprogramming tools can generate Flash content on the fly. The only closed aspect of Flash is the player, just as say Internet Explorer is closed, yet though I’m uncertain, a third party could likely implement a SWF flash player if they choose to invest in that just like Mozilla and Apple both chose to invest in many web browsers that rendered HTML.

Web Standards

Next Steve started evangelizing open standards on the web. This is hypocritical and misguided on many fronts. First of all this can be applied to flash as a browser plugin, but not the flash packager, as like monotouch and Apple’s own xcode and objective-C . That isn’t the web that is an IPHONE application. In fact many of the applications that would have been developed with the flash packager would have nothing to do with the internet. many would have been standalone casual games that run totally offline. If he criticizes that for not being Open Web Standards, then there should neither be any appstore and objective-C applications and everything on the iPhone should be web apps.

Also apple’s stance on standards is quite a charade. They criticize Microsoft for not being standard compliant (while many of the standards derive from Microsoft’s own proprietary innovations to the browser over the years), while implementing nonstandard webkit-this and webkit-that extensions left right and center such as webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio. They do this  with the audacity of calling those extensions “emerging standards”.  This is no different than Microsoft’s own vector based enhancements and directX effect additions like filter:Alpha(style=2) . I actually have NO PROBLEM with apple doing this, nor did I with Microsoft. I just have a problem with Apple claiming one thing and doing another. The fact is innovation requires this. There are things of the traditional web that didn’t work well on the small screen and didn’t interface well with touch, and it is fine for Apple to innovate here.

Later in the letter Steve labels Flash as a kind of technology that is the Lowest Common Denominator. This is something that I say is true of Browsers, and also standards in general. Standards though with their value inhibit innovation. If this wasn’t the case then there would be no need for native iPhone applications and 3d games and top grade applications on the iPhone would be able to be made easily in a browser and would run fast.

As for his third point on reliability security and performance, I really can’t comment about flash as a web plugin, especially on a mobile device. Let’s come back in a year or so and see how it’s gone on Android. However as previously explained this is a moot point for Adobe’s native Flash compiler.

Battery Life, H.264 and animation performance.

Now for battery life. I don’t have any benchmarks, but based on my understanding the native applications shouldn’t wear any harder than an objective-C application. UI with rich animations will likely utilize the graphics hardware and that uses battery a lot faster. I notice all the time that my iPhones battery goes dead a lot faster playing games than using simple UI applications and this makes sense technical whether it’s being driven by Objective-C , flash or MonoTouch. Graphical intense applications use the graphical hardware as well as use the CPU more intensively than applications that are idle waiting for user input. He also compares flash rendering using CPU versus iPhones rendering using hardware And the battery life is hugely different. However flash on iPhone rendering H.264 would also use the hardware and the battery usage would be comparable.

On the H.264 front. Adobe had implemented that as its preferred high quality codec before the iPhone even came on the scene so I don’t know what Steve is referring to when he says “recently”. Also on the open standards front  Browsers (and apple) are choosing to use the non-open H.264 codec for video. This requires licensing and in the future even royalties (though that has recently been deferred for about half a decade). H.264 isn’t for everything either. Other codecs that flash uses are suitable for smaller sized videos with a lower frame rate.

Flash is more than just for playing videos. It’s for animation, and the speed of flash animation is FAR MORE PERFORMANT than the speed of HTML5 animation. There have been many tests done with simple to advanced animation that show this. A simple animation that may get 30 odd frames per second in flash compares to the best written HTML5 version with about 2 frames per second. So out of HTML or FLASH, which is the lowest common denominator?

Touch Touch Touch

Next up is the issue of Touch. Oh yeah Touch, it’s the reason I love my iPod touch and my iPad. Yes its true there is a lot of flash content that works with hovering and dragging. Hovering doesn’t work with touch, and dragging is something that the IphoneOS chooses to take control of and not pass through to the browser directly as it manages it for scrolling itself. This isn’t a flash problem this is content for one medium working on another medium. You have the same problems with a lot of Web content. Rich web application often use dragging and dropping, and hovering has been a mainstay of web design for many years. I’ve been frustrated on my iPad not being able to interact with standard compliant web pages that depend on hovering from showing things to interacting with menus. The truth is to work in a desktop and touch world developers of apps and webpages alike have to adapt and you can bet your bottom dollar that developers will update their flash apps to be touch friendly.

This is even truer for the iPhone packager. With that people are designing applications specifically for the iPhone and iPad and Adobe has exposed the touch functionality to be as flexible and as natural as any iPhones application. It’s true that these apps will have to be rewritten but why do that then instead of using “modern” technologies like HTML and JavaScript?

There are a few reasons. One you may only need to rewrite 5 to 10% of your application to make it an excellent touch application tuned specifically for the iPhone and running well on the iPhone compared to rewriting 100% to convert it to a web app, where the web app wouldn’t be in the app store, and it wouldn’t be able to use the full power of the Iphone, and as mentioned above its animation would be second rate. Besides Flash’s Action script is a close cousin to JavaScript and on the iPhone has the advantage of rather than being interpreted like JavaScript in Safari is, it is compiled to native code like Objective-C or C++ or C# with MonoTouch.

Third Party Layer argument. (API/SDK/Library/Engine)

Next is the last argument and the clincher but also flawed to its core. Steve argues that a third party layer ultimately results in sub-standard applications. Here I’m going to talk about tools and platforms and languages that go far beyond flash

First I’d like to separate “third party layer” from Language. Flash has a language ActionScript that gets compiled,

And then it will have its own libraries with its own UI layer, that basically just wants a surface to draw on, not unlike a HTML5 canvas, or a OpenGL surface that games use. It is not likely using Cocoa for its UI, because Cocoa isn’t the appropriate API for animation. OpenGL is. With existing iPhone applications  Some use CocoaTouch while others use the drawing APIs of the IPhone and others use OpenGL. Games typically use OpenGL. Some small applications that are little more than a pretty effect may call openGL directly and others especially games with have one or more layers in between. Graphical drawing engines, and game engines. Some of these game engines will have a higher level of abstraction and be larger and have more layers than flash will. This is just how complicated software is made and engineered and it’s ridiculous for Apple to prohibit this, and if they do they need to be consistent and pull the majority of games from the app store also.

In preventing flash, with 3.3.1 Apple is also incurring much collateral damage, whether intention or not. Frameworks like MonoTouch actually don’t have such a third party layer as they are designed to integrate naturally and effectively with CocoaTouch directly yet they are penalized because the “original language” before compilation happens to be something other than apple’s pet language – Objective-C.

There are many substandard applications in the App store currently , not because they use a third party layer, but because they don’t have the well luxury of having an engineered and tested third party layer already doing the difficult things for them. These applications crash and have memory leaks as web developers who may have experience in design tools like flash and html, and who can tinker some in a forgiving language like JavaScript come crash bang up against a systems programming language like Objective-C.

Objective-C is a language that stagnated for more than 20 years after losing the “C replacement” battle to C++. Don’t get me wrong I actually enjoy Objective-C and though adept at C++, I’d much rather writes Objective-C with COCOA than doing C++ with COM on windows. However restricting developers to languages and tools that don’t have the innovation and growth of programming languages over the last 20 years is ludicrous. There has been much innovation (such as memory management) and the truth is for certain types of applications it costs experienced developers more time and thus money to build the same thing with different languages, and time is money. Imagine if all web pages on the internet had to be made in Objective-C?

Steve also says that cross platform languages don’t let any one particular platform shine, and this is true to a point and will happen regardless. Certain sized developers will only put in enough effort to get their application running and won’t tweak it to take advantage of the unique aspects of each platform, but in a competitive world it doesn’t end here.

Let’s use games as an example. Large game companies put a lot of effort in building and tweaking their 3d engines and game engines for each platform they are on. They spent years and millions of dollars doing this and they want their games to utilize the unique features of each platform and push each platform to the limit. This may not be the case with casual games, but it is the case with major games. So do they write each game from scratch in a different language on each platform? No they don’t they write whatever is unique for each platform , and abstract their engine into one of these “third party layers” and have the bulk of the game be the same on each platform. They do go and add special features and tweak things per platform (and sometimes on PC per graphics card) to get things just right.

So let’s say I’m to write an application, if allowed using C# with Monotouch on Iphone OS, and I’m also going to write the same application for Android and Windows Phone 7. The common “business logic” and non-specific and non UI code I would write in C# classes that would be able to be reused on each version; however I’d write different UI for each. On iPhone I would use CocoaTouch, on Windows Phone 7 I’d use its Silverlight based UI and on Android I’d use something , I don’t know what but something different than the two of those. The UI coding may be about 20% of the development effort, but rather than having to make inferior applications but rewriting 100% of each platform, I have extra time and budget to tweak the app for the platforms I care about such as the iPhone. Also my application would really like to run in the background. Easy on Android, but for iPhone I’d write special code to use the new iPhone OS4 background abilities, and write special code for whatever mechanism Microsoft Releases for its mobile OS. I would do this because I want my app to be good and competitive. If I can’t do this, then I’d probably end up having to rewrite my app fully in Objective-C and do a half-baked job.

Challenging Steve’s conclusions.

Steve said that Flash is from the PC error era and for PCs and Mice. I think that was the context it was in, but you could say many aspects of the iPhone OS were from a unix server error and designed for servers. It’s a ridiculous point. CS5 Flash packager proves it can do touch and do it well, as can other languages and toolkits. Steve please don’t stifle our innovation, our creativity and our livelihoods. Steve also says that the mobile era is about Open Web Standards yet reality shows otherwise, it says it’s about proprietary native applications, whether for iPhone, android or windows mobile 7. How many iPhone targeted webapps are there compared to app store apps? How much time do iphone users spend in native apps compared to webapps (other than just generate website browsing)? Steve makes so many points against Adobe that just don’t stack up to reality or which could be thrown back in Apple’s own hypocritical face.

Class Action Lawsuit

I don’t know much about class action lawsuits nor what groups they can be based but it doesn’t seem that it would be right or legal for Apple to affect so many companies’ livelihoods and investments on a whim. I don’t know how many millions of dollars Adobe put into R&D for Flash Packager nor how much investment Novell put into MonoTouch , or their customers have put into building applications with MonoTouch. I know unity3D has invested years of R&D into their excellent game engine with great tools targeting the IPhones ecosystem with their many customers who have invested untold money and time building their games for the iPhone OS. Then there is the phoneGap, and Titanium companies and customers. the total sum of these developers , and companies compounds to significant losses and damages, and on top of that you can add the losses of their customers who bought applications on the app store which now probably won’t be allowed to be updated so people invested in apps via the appstore that are forced to not have a future. Maybe a class action lawsuit could be extended to appstore denials for many of the other arbitrary reasons why 1000s of apps have been denied or removed. Maybe the biggest anticompetitive aspect is the locked down app store and lawsuits could force apple to allow alternative or open methods of application delivery to the IphoneOS just as other operating systems like windows allows application distribution without approval (though vendors can choose to get windows  logo certified or such) through the internet, and various installer technologies, from usb sticks, from CD roms etc.

Antitrust Violations

Some people question antitrust as in that Apple isn’t a monopoly in the smartphone industry, but the thing is the iPhone ecosystem is large and is an industry in itself. If a company was a monopoly in say cable television you couldn’t say it wasn’t such because it’s not a monopoly in broadcasting and it actually only has a small share of the whole broadcasting industry. As such Microsoft is clearly a monopoly or near monopoly in the OS realm (and some other realms) but not in the computer software industry as a whole.

I’m glad to see that the government is at least looking into this. Which seems triggered by an Adobe complaint.

Another clause 3.3.9  (read about it at wired news ) which I wasn’t paying attention to but is in the same vein may be extra fodder against Apple in antitrust matters as again with the stroke of a pen they crush an already blossoming industry with players like admob that were valued at > $750 million . Individual apps or ad networks suddenly have a huge part of their existing product feature set (being able to analyze whether people clicked on their ads or not) disallowed so that apple’s new iAd platform can have exclusive dibs.

Final thoughts

A huge aspect is how will Apple (and others)  interpret this & how consistently will it be enforced, however as software development companies we can’t trust such risks based on the mood of Apple from one day to the next.

and by the way , i don’t really personally care if flash packager gets accepted on iphone. I don’t think i will develop for flash again, but i am fighting for the freedom for all developers to be able to use the tools of their choice that work and the freedom to not have your livelihood threatened by companies like Apple abusing their position but changing rules on their whim. This is professional software development not a 1st grade playground where a bossy kid just keeps changing the rules of the game so they are the only winner.

This is only a draft and I’m sure I’ve made many spelling and grammatical errors and probably a few times missed a word negating my meaning entirely. All comments and corrections are welcome.

Also here i want to gather a list of links to all good commentary on this issue. Links and suggestions would be appreciated. I’ll start with a few

Steves Letter – http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Miguel De Icaza – http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Apr-28.html

More links to come, i need to get to bed for now.

Karl Prosser

function get-ipinformation
{
process {
    (Get-WmiObject Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration -computer $_ ) | ? { $_.IPenabled } |
    select (AS Server , __server,
        DNSHostName ,  DNSHostName ,
        Mac , Macaddress,
        Description, Description,
        DNSDomain , DNSDomain,
        FirstIPAddress ,{ ($_.IPAddress) | select -first 1 },
        IPAddressAll , { [string] $_.IPAddress} ,
        IPSubnet , {($_.IPSubnet) | select -first 1 } ,
        IPSubnetall , { [string] $_.IPSubnet },
        DefaultIPGateway, { ($_.DefaultIPGateway) | select -first 1 } ,
        DefaultIPGatewayALL, { [string] $_.DefaultIPGateway },
        DHCPEnabled , { [bool] $_.DHCPEnabled },
        DHCPServer,  DHCPServer,
        PrimaryDNSServer , { ( $_.DNSServerSearchOrder)[0]  },
        SecondaryDNSServer , { ( $_.DNSServerSearchOrder)[1]  },
        AllDNSServer , { [string] $_.DNSServerSearchOrder },
        WINSPrimaryServer , WINSPrimaryServer,
        WINSSecondaryServer , WINSSecondaryServer,

        #random ones
        DomainDNSRegistrationEnabled , DomainDNSRegistrationEnabled,
        FullDNSRegistrationEnabled , FullDNSRegistrationEnabled,
        DNSDomainSuffixSearchOrder, DNSDomainSuffixSearchOrder,
        WINSEnableLMHostsLookup , WINSEnableLMHostsLookup
       )
    }
}

#requires the follow function
function new-selectexpression
{
if ($args.count -eq 1) { $theargs = $args[0] } else {$theargs= $args }
if ($theargs.count -gt 1)
{
for($loop=0;$loop -lt ($theargs.count-1);$loop+=2)
 {
  @{Name=$theargs[$loop];Expression=$theargs[$loop+1]}
 }
}
if (!($theargs.count % 2) -eq 0) {@{Name=$input[$input.count-1];Expression= invoke-Expression "{}" } }
}

• Download email as often as once per minute
• Supports leaving emails on the POP server for a specified number of days or indefinitely
• Ability to only download emails from the POP server from a particular point in time, preventing emails that have already been downloaded from from being duplicated (This is very helpful if the POP state file is lost and you are setting up the mail accounts for a second time or if you are transitioning from using Outlook to download the POP email and keeping a copy on the server)
• Ability to archive messages
• Supports all versions of Exchange or any SMTP server
• Supports downloading from GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo and other online accounts with POP access
• Supports SSL connections
• Detailed logging and debugging viewable in a log file and Event Viewer
• Large attachments

There are also very interesting possibilities and uses used in conjunctions with a product like Gmail for your domain where you can have Google for your domain being the main place email is landing, giving you a free “online backup” as well as not requiring an enterprise grade always on internet connection for your SMB exchange server, and also not having to waste incoming bandwidth of the 90% of mail traffic which is spam. Using this you’d also get free spam protection from Google mail. However you still will be using exchange and outlook thus getting the best of both worlds, having that enterprise quality exchange/outlook business experience.

We are providing ST POP Connector for FREE for up to 3 mailboxes and
the full version is free for Microsoft MVP’s.  Just email us with a link to your MVP profile to info at shelltools dot net.

To read more or to Download it go to http://www.popconnector.com

So in this test app, you can see we are first in CMD, then we run this application then after than its alternating between CMD and PowerShell Prompts and you see the expression 1 worked in PowerShell while having a problem in CMD.EXE

So i hear you say what’s the source code for this little demo? – I’m glad you asked

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var p = new System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo("powershell");
            p.UseShellExecute = false;
            System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(p);
        }
    }

So why is this happening. Well normally when a console application calls another and they run using the same console window the first one is effectively paused while the 2nd one is running, then when the 2nd one exits it resumes.

so the flow here if it were working would be

CMD –> TESTAPP –> POWERSHELL

CMD naturally is waiting for testapp to exit, then in the sample code TESTAPP starts powershell, but i forgot to waitfor powershell to exit before proceding, so TestApp and PowerShell are sharing the same console for a split second then TestAPP Exits, and when TestApp exits CMD regains control of the console.. Now you have too totally separate programs CMD and POWERSHELL competing and using the same physical console window.

The fix is really simple.

.

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var p = new System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo("powershell");
            p.UseShellExecute = false;
            var proc = System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(p);
            proc.WaitForExit();
        }
    }

Not really a biggie, but i thought it would be an interesting thing to share, and probably the cause of a bit of hair pulling  by many.

One of the reasons why it doesn’t show up is the install isn’t just PowerShell but packaged with WinRM (and optionally Bits 4.0) as something called “Windows Management Framework” . This is good to know and remember since that is what will show up in your add/remove programs if you ever need to remove it.

Anyway how about a year ago after getting fed up with doing that, and also after seeing Mono’s C# commandline interface i thought lets do something quick and dirty that could do this..

with the script that will follow you can do stuff like (c being an alias for the function that compiles and runs a C# expression

(c DateTime.Now).adddays(5)
(c "new{a=1,b=2,c=3}").b
c 'from x in Directory.GetFiles(@"f:\downloads") where x.Contains("win") select x'

an interesting thing i found out, was that with the C# compiler in memory i can’t create more than one anonymous type (2nd example above) with the same signature (i.e int,int,int ) so the compiler will try to create the exact same type again.

So it may seem pointless to call DateTime.Now when you can just do [DateTime]::Now but thats not the point, the point was it was running C#, returning an object that you could immediately use in powershell. I threw a linq example in there just to show you a glimpse of the potential.

So how do you do this. You could even do this in V1 with codedom generation but here i’m using PowerShell V2

function run-csharpexpression([string] $expression )
{
$global:ccounter = [int]$ccounter + 1
$local:name  =  [system.guid]::NewGuid().tostring().replace('-','_').insert(0,"csharpexpr")
$local:ns = "ShellTools.DynamicCSharpExpression.N${ccounter}"

$local:template = @"
using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

namespace $ns
{
public static class Runner
{
public static object RunExpression()
{
return [[EXPRESSION]];
}
}
}
"@

$local:source = $local:template.replace("[[EXPRESSION]]",$expression)

add-Type $local:source -Language CsharpVersion3 | out-Null
invoke-Expression ('[' + $local:ns + '.Runner]::RunExpression()')
}

Thanks to Oising http://www.nivot.org for playing around with this when i was building it.

So if i wanted to really turn this into something industrial quality what would i do?

• try to work out a way that i could create the same anonymous type twice..
• deal with exceptions well
• make a version that you can pass in objects from powershell to the expression, and that they could even be put in as fields on the runner class so you could reference them by name from C#
• Make a version that is designed to be run as part of the pipeline, where the function wrapper would manage the PROCESS block and call the csharp expression once every PROCESS block invocation.
• I would possibly make a special version of Generics since generics interop is often one of the harder things in Dotnet
• I’d have it keep a track of all the classes it has made, and have functions to look at them and interact with them and maybe reuse them. Particularly if they are parameterized.

Of course if you were so pathologically inclined you could very easily adapt this to make a VB.NET version too.

Enjoy. And if anybody feels inspired to make a better more industrial quality version i’d love to have a look at it.

However when dealing with more than the first match.. or where the replace was not just a simple string replace.There are many cases where a simple string substitution was not enough and i really needed to apply some logic at each match to work out what it was to replace it with.

The problem was it took me about 5 or 6 lines of code each time, and broke my “keep everything in the pipeline” goal as well as my workflow. So here is a function to do this. In reality it could be a lot more robust, and could be part of a whole family of such functions carefully sculpted for your regex needs.

More importantly than regex however, this is a good example of refactoring logic in powershell into a one liner, and how using using scriptblock in a “closure” manner where the end user passes in a scriptblock they wrote and gets some automatic variables from the scope of your function. Lets look at the function and an example.

function replace-regexgroup ([regex]$regex, [string]$text ,[scriptblock] $replaceexpression)
{
$regex.Replace($text,{
$thematch = $args[0]
$groupnames = $regex.GetGroupNames()
for ($count = 0; $count -lt ( $thematch.groups.count) ; $count++)
{
set-variable -name $($groupnames[$count]) -visibility private -value $($thematch.groups[$count] )
}
if ($replaceexpression -ne $Null) { &$replaceexpression}
} )
}

So the user passes in the regular expression, the text that they want to do the replace on and a scriptblock which is the expression that will be run for each match, and the result of that expression will be what the each match is replaced with. You can see how i use set-variable to set a variable in the of my function based on the name of each regex match (i really should also do a $1 , $2 , $3 as many people are used to in jquery and such. ) Then i call the scriptblock with &$replaceexpression . I haven’t decided in scenarios like this whether to invoke such scriptblocks with & which will create a child scope for them to run in or rather execute then in my scope with the dotsource operator “.”.

So how do we use this. Well in the first scenario when i made this, i was exporting wiki contents from a desktop app that used HTML stored in a database. I wanted a backup of this content in plain html and it had links such as shown below

$example = @"
<P><a href="wiki://284_636">links to test page 2</a></P>
<P><a href="wiki://109_49">
"@

and i needed to find all those Wiki links and needed to know and transform it based on the two numbers on either side on the _ (in the first case 284 and 636) which i did with the following line of code.

replace-regexgroup 'wiki://(?<wholething>(?<folder>\d+)_(?<page>\d+))' $example { "$folder/$page/index.html" }

You can see that the regex named different groups and that my scriptblock is simply one string with variable expandsion inside using the automagically created variables $folder and $page based on the regex groups.

Here is a link to the script on PoshCode .

I hope that this is more than just a good starting point for a regular expression function but something that helps teach the value of scriptblocks and how they can be used to make reusable code that simplifies your workflow.

-Karl

function calculateurl ([string]$source)
{
$encoded =  ([byte[]]([regex]::matches($source,'\w{2}') |% {"0x$_"}))
$a = 0
$sbox = 0..255
$seed = "sdf883jsdf22";
$mykey = 0..255 | % {  ([byte[]] ($seed.tochararray()))[$_ % $seed.length] }
0..255 | % {$a = ($a + $sbox[$_] + $mykey[$_]) % 256;$b = $sbox[$_];$sbox[$_] = $sbox[$a];$sbox[$a] = $b;}
$a = $b = 0;$output = "";
$encoded | % {$a = ($a + 1) % 256;$b = ($b + $sbox[$a]) % 256;$e = $sbox[$a];$sbox[$a] = $sbox[$b];$sbox[$b] = $e;
                     $h = ($sbox[$a] + $sbox[$b]) % 256; $d = $sbox[$h]; $_ -bxor $d } | % { $output += [char]$_ }
$output
}
#function to cache a playlist.com playlist locally.
function cacheplaylist([string]$path,[string]$playlistnumber)
{
([xml](new-object system.net.webclient).downloadstring("http://pl.playlist.com/pl.php?playlist=$([int]($playlistnumber/256))")).playlist.tracklist.track | % {
try { $a= $_.tracktitle;$a;(new-object system.net.webclient).downloadfile((calculateurl $_.location),"$path\$a.mp3");"$a downloaded" } catch {"$a failed" } }
}

and you can simply invoke it like this

 cacheplaylist c:\musiccache 2952517899

get-thousandsofitems | % { do-something $_ } | whatever

Only to have some exception happen in do-something and it throws the whole thing. When really you don’t care, you’d rather just be able to know what failed and have it move on. This happens a fair bit with Get-WMIobject etc, because one of the machines may be off, firewall blocked, some sort of permissions issues – things that bubble up even when you have the preference set to SilentyContinue.

So what do we normally do in this scenario. We either pipeline it and make it look like a VBscript, or ruin our beautiful single liner by making that script complicated with V1 traps and the likes, and we usually get the error handling wrong wrong a number of times along the way.

Well with PowerShell you can always adjust and expand the language. There is nothing particular special about the foreach-object Cmdlet. In its common use you can replicate it with a function as simple as the one below.

function myforeach-object([scriptblock]$process) { process { &$process } }

So how about making a looping function that deals with the exceptions for you, you say? Great Idea!, Now you are cooking. The following function is pretty much a simple V1 function, though it should really be completed and production readied into a V2 Advanced function with all the modern trimmings and trappings, however I DO use V2 TRY/CATCH syntax instead of V1 Trapping, because its more sane to us who don’t have a secret VBscript fetish.

function foreach-withexception ([scriptblock]$process,$outputexception)
{
  begin { $global:foreachex = @() }
  process {
            try
            {
            $local:inputitem = $_
            &$process
            }
            catch
            {
            $local:exceptionitem = 1 | select-object object,exception
            $local:exceptionitem.object = $local:inputitem
            $local:exceptionitem.exception = $_
            $global:foreachex += $local:exceptionitem
            }
          }
  end {}
}
set-alias %ex foreach-withexception

So i love my aliases , %ex for foreach with exceptions. Really I wish i could come up with a better name for the long function. I also keep a %i for my foreach-index function as well. Basically you use this just like foreach-object (though i haven’t implemented a begin and end area in this), and exceptions get eaten, but after the fact you can access the object that caused the error, and the error in the global $foreachex variable. At a later date i’m going to add an option paramter variable that if can put the exception in instead of a naughty global variable. But as Jeffrey Snover says “To ship is to choose” though for me it really means “this function does what i need it to now, i need to go back and solve the Real problem i’m solving that this function really helps with”

here is an example

100..-5 | %ex {  "yo $_" ;  1 / $_ }

$foreachex

normally 0/0 would throw a fuss , and kill the whole thing, but it just works on , and you can check to see if there are any errors in $foreachex Normally the things that i need this for though are “loose web services”, WMI, or networking sort of things. but really it simplifies my one liners, and gets things done quicker.

@poshcode | Download

function print-file($file)
{
 begin  {
    function internal-printfile($thefile)
    {
        if ($thefile -is [string]) {$filename = $thefile }
        else {
                if ($thefile.FullName -is [string] ) { $filename = $THEfile.FullName }
             }
        $start = new-object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo $filename
        $start.Verb = "print"
        [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start($start)
    } 

if ($file -ne $null) {
                $filespecified = $true;
                internal-printfile $file
            }
       }
process{if (!$filespecified) { write-Host process ; internal-printfile $_ } } 

}

@poshcode | download

Here you can pass in a path to the file , or a fileobject that you get as a response from get-childitem (dir)

Here are a few examples

#look recursively through a folder and print all word documents
dir *.doc -r | print-file 

#print one particular pdf file
print-file c:\downloads\myfile.pdf

Warning, this isn’t up to being a shrink wrapped deliverable. It doesn’t do any error handling, isn’t a nice V2 advanced function or anything, but that’s a beauty of PowerShell, you can just hack out something that fits your needs in a few minutes. With V2 parameter binding, this would be more elegant and actually simpler as i have to do some duplication of logic in my function to get it to work accepting the file both through the pipeline and as a parameter.

-Enjoy.

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
   }
} 

.

.

function new-pscustomobject ([string[]] $names , [object[]] $values )
{$obj = 1| select-object $names;
0..($names.length-1) | % { $obj.$($names[$_]) = $values[$_] };$obj
}

and you could use it like

new-pscustomobject -names name, age, height -values "karl", 29, 195

Whats interesting here are a few things.. one using select-object as a quick and dirty way of creating a stub object with properties without values.. the 1 | pipeing is just to get it to run once and create one object… it really could be anything. Another thing is using the 0..(whatever) to create a collection, and then use foreach to iterate over that. Its very “PowerShelleze” but a fair bit slower than a foreach ($x in $y) or a for loop. I think the real “dynamic language” feature this shows up, is address properties of an object dynamically with $obj.$(expression) where expression calculates the name of the property. That feature of powershell comes in handy so often for me, and cuts down many a 200 line C# solution into a one liner.

[snapinini.newobjecthelper]::newObjectFast(@{name="karl";age=31;now = [datetime]::Now})

very simple and its at least 6 times faster than the closest other technique in powershell. Most of hte overhead is in creating the hashtable. (otherwise its 90 times faster). The hashtable syntax is very convenient however maybe even its overhead is too much and we deserve a better way.

Here is the C# method. Its pretty basic stuff.

public static PSObject newObjectFast( Hashtable noteproperties )

        {

            PSObject obj = new PSObject();

            if (noteproperties != null)

                foreach(DictionaryEntry item in noteproperties)

                    obj.Properties.Add(new PSNoteProperty((string)item.Key,item.Value));

            return obj;

        }

- Karl

What is it?

Portable PowerShell is software that allows you to run PowerShell on machines that don’t have PowerShell installed that you can run from a Machine that doesn’t have PowerShell on it, from a USB stick, on a machine that has a different version of PowerShell, a preinstall environment like BartPE, or WinPE or when booted to a windows 7 recovery DVD.

Why would I want it?

Administrators often cannot get their key tools, such as PowerShell installed in the environments they are working. This may be because a server installation has not yet been tested or approved, or the IT pro is working on a client’s environment, or a desktop support engineer is working on a machine that will likely not ever have PowerShell installed or enabled. Additionally you may want to run a different version of PowerShell than that installed, being able to do side by side work or comparisons when developing scripts. Having a thumb drive with portable PowerShell and all your own custom scripts with you at all times would be a dream come true to many administrators and IT pros.

How does it work?

You simple take our “PortablePowerShell” zip file and unzip it on a computer that already has PowerShell and Run “MakePortable.exe” and that will produce a folder containing everything you need to run PowerShell portable. From there you can just run it, or then copy it onto other computers, or onto a USB stick.

Does it use App-V or Thinapp?

Though we experimented with ThinApp and App-V for this very purpose a few years ago, we do not use either of those technologies as the past on licensing costs would be prohibitive for the majority of our customers. Instead we have crafted our own “Application Virtualization” particularly targeting the needs of the PowerShell engine.

What about PowerShell V2

In the future after the full release of PowerShell V2 we will release a version that will be able to produce a Portable PowerShell V2, however we made a Portable WinRM so V2 remoting will be limited or non-existent, however we are investigating what is needed to ensure that PowerShell V2 remoting will work.

What about Third Party Snapins?

Snap-in DLLs can be distributed with Portable PowerShell, and we have a configuration tool, and an XML configuration file that ensures that snapins get registered with the Portable PowerShell. However if the third party snapin’s installer puts other files in different places and maintains its own product registry , those snapins may not work. We do however provide a way that you can create and maintain virtual registry settings. We will set up a forum where instructions of including different snapins can be shared with the community. We are confident the majority of Third Party snapins will be able to be run, and we are willing to update the product to accommodate important but “difficult” snapins.

Other Features include ability to produce “custom portable PowerShell’s with special logging, specific scripts build in, scheduling etc.

So when can I get this and how much will it Cost?

ShellTools debuted with bring PowerShell Analyzer then PowerShellPlus, which is now produced and sold by Idera, successfully to market. We have a commitment to our customers, and we want to ensure that what we make lasts, and is feasible to maintain and support. We also learnt that bringing a product to market requires a lot more effort that just excellent software engineering. So basically we are now starting the process of working out whether ShellTools Portable PowerShell is commercially feasible and that we should bring it to market, or whether we just keep it as our own internal tool.

To help us decide could you please fill out the following survey? Additionally if you leave your email address with us in the survey you will likely be invited into the private Beta.

Link to Survey

Embedded Survey

Thanks,
The ShellTools Team.

Search results from the PowerShell Code Repository right there on your desktop in windows 7 thanks to federated search and Jaykul adding OpenSearch support to PoshCode. YAY

So how do you get this. Simply download this link  and save it as fileextention .OSDX to your windows 7 machine. Then Run it. 

That is a simple OSDX file that is just an XML file describing the OpenSearch interface. the full text is here. and it comes from PoshCode itself.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
  <ShortName>PoshCode</ShortName>
  <Description>PowerShell script repository search interface</Description>
  <Tags>PowerShell Scripts Scripting Code Modules</Tags>
  <Contact>feedback@poshcode.org</Contact>
  <Url type="text/html" template="http://poshcode.org/search/{searchTerms}" />
  <Url type="application/rss+xml" template="http://poshcode.org/api/{searchTerms}" />
  <Image height="16" width="16" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">http://poshcode.org/favicon.ico</Image>
<!–   <Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" template="http://localhost:7402/content/notes.opensearchsuggestions.json?qt={searchTerms}"/>

  –>
  </OpenSearchDescription>

1) The first thing I did was go to plug in my cell phone charger, however I plugged it into a dodgy outlet that the landlord was meant to have replaced months ago. We’ll I haven’t been electrocuted that bad since the time in China when I jumped out of the bath, and came in contact with live wires. Thankfully i’m all ok, but half of metal of charger plug is gone. It was quite odd, it looked like a spark that flew out, but stayed bright for like 10 seconds. It must have been heated up melted metal.

2) Second thing i managed to do was lock myself in a room, with little kids in the other part of the house, while my wife was out. Anyhow during the podcast (after i managed to get on it since i had given the hosts the wrong area code of my phone number) I managed to pick my way out with a sewing measuring tape. But maybe i should have just stayed there because the third thing takes the cake.

3)So it was time to go and pick my daughter up from “Daisies”. I got in our minivan , pulled a perfect u turn off at the end of the street, then I saw our cat run up a tree and wanted to grab it. So I pulled up abruptly put the van in park, then jumped out quickly with the engine still running, HOWEVER IT WASN’T IN PARK BUT IN REVERSE So there was my van driving itself backwards down the street. I had to run after it, and after a brief attempt to stop it with my brute force, i jumped in and put the break on.

Finally i read a comment on the podcast ustream chat that the hosts may have lost the whole interview. Sounds like a true Wacky Wednesday .

I just thank God that i’m alive, and not hurt, and that i still have a complete car and our neighbours still have complete houses.

-Karl

The extensibility model of ISE has caught on, and many people have been writing some great scripts adding hotkeys to do every what not you could imagine, so I’ve decided to start a codeplex project with the punny name “PowerShell ISE-Cream” . The Goal of this project is first to gather a huge variety of functionality that various people are willing to share, refactor it into production quality functions, with extensive error handling, and packaged in V2 Modules, and finally incorporate it in a way that users can easily turn on and off different features through a consistent configuration.

Right now however we are just going to gather whatever scraps there are, whether they conflict with each other or not, and anybody passionate about this can join the project, as we sculpt it hopefully into something both useful and beautiful.

Doug Finke has already joined the club with his Expand-Alias and Expand-CurrentAlias functions, and there are quite a few other functions that people i know are willing to share, so it should be good.

We’ll be brainstorming and deciding on a bunch of design issue, you can join the conversation on the first one in this discussion thread.

The PowerScripting Podcast tonight (Thursday 5th Feb 2009) will be talking about ISE. There should be a number of MVPs (including myself) and some PowerShell Team staff calling in. It Should be fun.

-Karl

Anyhow, I’m pretty much going to reblog the content from Tobias’s blog entry below. If you haven’t tried PS+ yet. I recommend wholeheartedly that you do. It really is about 3 generations and a couple of years ahead of anything else out there. Other vendors have only recently implemented “borrowed” features that have been in PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShell Plus since 2006.

http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/news/archive/2009/02/02/powershellplus-v2-1-beta-is-live.aspx

———————————————————

Exciting news! Effective immediately, PowerShellPlus v2.1 Beta is live and publicly available! Below you will find exciting information about an early look at what the PowerShellPlus team has been working on.

PowerShellPlus version 2.1 introduces several new and cool features focused on reducing the PowerShell learning curve, increasing the productivity of PowerShell development and exercising the capabilities of PowerShell 2.0. The new features include:

• Code sharing – Enables you to leverage the wealth of scripts that reside in the PowerShell.com and PoshCode.org libraries. Increase your productivity by quickly and easily searching and grabbing the scripts from those libraries. You can also submit your own scripts to the PowerShell.com library directly from PowerShell Plus Editor
• Visual Basic support – The PowerShell Plus Editor can now edit and run Visual Basic scripts
• STA mode support – Enables you to produce pretty cool looking GUI’s with Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) using PowerShell 2.0.
• PowerShell Assembly Detection – Gives the Learning Center an auto-upgrade path if PowerShell v2 CTP3 is detected and then displays the most up-to-date information
• Learning Center Auto-Load – Makes searching for a request with a single match much easier to use since the topic will load automatically, saving extra keystrokes
• Cmdlet parameter position – Shows you additional information in the code completion popup window about parameters including position and type
• Console size overlay – Shows you the height and width of the Console when you resize it
• Additional Sample Scripts - Active Directory, IIS 7.0 and MySQL
• PowerShell v2 CTP3 Support – Including Block Comments and the $Profile variable

How to get the New Version

Use the link at the bottom of this page to download the installation package, but before you do please read the following disclaimers, warnings and other general portents of doom.

• This software is a pre-release version and should not be deployed in a production environment. It will not work the way a final version of the software does. Features will change before the final release
• If you already have a PowerShellPlus license we recommend that you install this version on another machine, but we do support an upgrade in place your production version.
• If you upgrade your production version of 2.0 we will not overwrite any user customizations that have been made to PowerShellPlus but we do recommend you make a copy of the Sample scripts if you have modified them.
• A list of the changes is provided in the Release Notes in the Installation Package.
• This release is designed to provide the PowerShellPlus community with a preview of key features coming in 2.1 and to solicit feedback about them. This Technical Beta is not supported by the Idera Technical Support Team. Please visit the Beta Place: http://powershell.com/cs/forums/93.aspx

System Requirements

• Microsoft Windows PowerShell Version 1 or Version 2 CTP2 or CTP3
• Windows XP, Server 2003, Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7

Installation Instructions

To install PowerShellPlus:

1. Click the link at the bottom of this page and complete the download form
2. An email will be sent with instructions on how to download the Beta.
3. After downloading the Beta, unzip the contents of the Installer package.
4. Read the Release Notes for late breaking information about the Beta.
5. If you are upgrading from PowerShellPlus 2.0 make that you copy the Sample Scripts to another location, if you have modified them.
6. Run the Setup.exe program to install PowerShellPlus 2.1.

Grab your copy now:

Download Here

For feedback, bug reports, suggestions and discussions regarding this beta release, please visit and use our Beta Place:

http://powershell.com/cs/forums/93.aspx

Enjoy!

-Tobias

So my starting point:

WHAT HAVE I GOT SO FAR?
    -I’ve decided on the platform
    -the idea and name of the app
    -written a few thoughts, notes down,
    -registered the twitter account that its going to be based around.
    -I am a proficient DOTNET developer, but a fair bit of asp.net experience, but I wouldn’t say an ASP.NET expert, and I haven’t touched ASP.NET MVC. I have however been reading about it during its development, and grok the concepts.
   – I’ve brainstormed many aspects of the features, design and architecture probably for more than a couple of hours in the background whilst doing real life.

WHAT HAVEN’T I DONE YET?
   -I don’t even have it installed in my development environment (which will be my first task).

WHAT I DON’T THINK WILL BE IN THE SCOPE OF THIS ALPHA?
   -Allowing the user to pass in their twitter credentials. I’m going to force any account related stuff to be sent via tweets from their account. I don’t want to even temporarily have twitter credentials pass through my server, until an app is fleshed out, tested, and secured.
   -Won’t be on the public internet – it will be running on localhost on my dev box.
   -Making it look pretty – I’ll just choose some basic ASP.NET MVP template to start with, and even "borrow" images from http://image.google.com while I flesh out the app. Of course once the first round of code is done, I’ll work on themeing it myself.
   -Won’t have any web based jobs updating my database with twitter responses. I’ll probably just have a build that part of it out in a powershell script on a recurring job for the first alpha.
   – Won’t have any ajaxy behavior. Jquery will be there, and may be used for a few visual things if it takes a short period of time, but this is pretty much just simple page requests showing data. However of course the 2nd alpha should be in more depth.
  – Will keep basic views, won’t use master pages or anything else.

WHAT I PLAY TO BE IN THE SCOPE OF THIS ALPHA.
-Allowing the user to issue commands through twitter ( with replies or direct message).
-Allowing the user to issue and record a few different types of information.
-Have a web page that displays the data related to this app, that includes graphs and charts
-Data will be retrieved by LINQ2SQL, but that LINQ2SQL will probably be simple, and for complicated queries will just call stored procedures.
-

FIRST STEPS. (some of these can be done concurrently )
-Download ASP.NET MVC and get a build in test project running.
-Choose an ASP.NET MVC template to start with
-Start the first ASP.NET MVC proof of concept. Basically get full round trip. From request->routing->controller->model (which will get data from DB) and back to view sort of thing.
-Start database and model design
-Start building powershell scripts to query twitter, and update the database.
-Fleshing out command syntax and scope limiting features.

I know I haven’t even said what this application will do, but that will come in time. I don’t plan on spamming by blog with lots of updates on this so I’ll be running a tubmlr blog for that. http://geekkarl.tumblr.com/ and will also be doing small summaries on twitter http://twitter.com/karlprosser . I’ll also be hanging out as usual in the #powershell IRC room on freenode.com and hopefully not getting too distracted there

-Karl

So what’s this got to do with debugging? We’ll mostly it’s the real time aspect. You are able to process a lot of information (notes), in context, and are able to discern real-time what is out of place and wrong.

Compare that to typical debugging. You might use checkpoints, and tracing through code, slowing down the execution often a million-fold, tediously stepping through each line of code, looking here and there.
Alternatively you might be processing log output, whether a debug stream in your IDE, console output, or something else. However just getting those messages to somewhere you can display can be hard when threading, and you aren’t in the GUI thread etc.
Additionally you are having to interpret this, often after the fact, and you can often miss things when lots is going on. How often , especially when finding a rare threading bug, are you running something 10 or more times, and maybe logging 10 or so different events each time. Going through the log takes time, and sometimes you miss the cue.

So, is debugging with sounds going to change and revolutionize everything? No its just another tool in a really great toolkit we have these days.

I thank my friend Oisin Grehan (http://nivot.org ) for inspiring this as I don’t think I’ve used sound in debugging since the my  Demoscene  days when I was coding MOD players. Mod Players . So naturaller the tracker syntax has inspired me a bit.

So how does this work. Well work out the steps you are listening to, and maybe things you particularly want to catch, play the notes over and over a few times so you know mentality what to expect, then just start running you code, and listen to what actually IS happening, and then maybe at certain times you might make a certain note MEAN something (like middle  C  for TRUE function result and middle A for FALSE), but I typically just use notices to indicate execution flow, and if I want to know some value, I ask windows Speech API to help me out.

function Play-Note([string]$note,[int] $duration = 5)
{
  if (!($note -match '(\d+)')) { $note+='4' };[void]($note -match '([A-G#]{1,2})(\d+)')
  [console]::Beep((440 * [math]::Pow([math]::pow(2,(1/12)),
    (([int] $matches[2]) - 4)* 12 + $( switch($matches[1])
  {  'A'  { 0 }  'A#' { 1 }  'Bb' { 1 }  'B'  { 2 }  'C'  { 3 }  'C#' { 4 }  'Db' { 4 }
     'D'  { 5 }  'D#' { 6 }  'Eb' { 6 }  'E'  { 7 }  'F'  { 8 }  'F#' { 9 }  'Gb' { 9 }
     'G'  { 10 } 'G#' { 11 } 'Ab' { 11 }
  }))),$duration * 100 )
}

So two things. I’ve based the notes on common tracker syntax including the octave. so middle A is A4 , then you have things like F#3 etc. however if as with everything PowerShell we want pithy, so if you don’t put an octave number then it will be 4 by default.

play-note C ; play-note Eb ; play-note “C#”

also i included a duration, so if the want the note to be anything but the default half a second put that as a parameter

play-note Eb4 20

and you’ll get an E flat for 2 whole seconds. You may ask why I don’t use seconds or milliseconds, because those are our official measurements in this 1,000,000 3 grouped western world. Well the reason is pithiness (something i love in my scripts, but aren’t good about when it comes to blogging). Typically i want a note between say 300 milliseconds and 5 seconds. so if i used milliseconds i’d always have to have those 2 or 3 extra zeros, while if i used seconds I’d be doing things like 0.4 and 1.5. If Japanese and Chinese we often communicate number differently, and group them differently. so there is a word for 10,000 , so to say 15 thousand you may say 1 (character for 10,000) 5.

So what about voice. You can use a very simple function using the SAPI COM objects such as:

function Speak-words ([string]$words,[bool]$pause = $true)
{   $flag = 1
    if ($pause) {$flag = 2}
    $voice = new-Object -com SAPI.spvoice
    $voice.speak($words, [int] $flag)
    # 2 means wait until speaking is finished to continue
}

Typically though i don’t create a $voice everytime , but kept a reference somewhere , like in my V2 module. Others however have done more impressive things with the voice in powershell ( http://poshcode.org/667 | http://huddledmasses.org/powershell-speaks/ ).

So now you may want a way to play more notes and speak more words together, in a pithy line. you can just use play-notes

function Play-Notes
{
$defaultduration = 5;if($args[0] -is [int]) {$defaultduration = $args[0]}
for($i = 0;$i -lt $args.length;$i++)
 {    $duration = $defaultduration
    if ($i -lt $args.length-1) { if ($args[$i+1] -is [int]) {$duration = $args[$i+1] } }
    if ($args[$i] -is [string]) {
        if ($args[$i].startswith("!")) { speak-words $args[$i].replace('!','') } else
        { play-note $args[$i] $duration }
        }
 }
}

And with this you can simply pass in a list of notes, which will be played with a default duration, unless you choose to specify a duration after the note.

play-notes A B C 20 E 10 B 10

play-notes F5 2 E5 2 D5 2 C5 2 B5 2 A5 2 G 4 F5 2 E5 2 D5 2 C5 2 B5 2 A5 2 G 4

If you want to change the default duration to reduce the redundancy above, just put that number as the first parameter

play-notes 2 F5 E5 D5 C5 B5 A5 G 4 F5 E5 D5 C5 B5 A5 G 4

and finally if you want some speaking in there, just have your string start with an exclamation mark!

play-notes "!here we go now" Db5 Db Eb Gb Ab "C#" 6 !YEAH

But of course most of the time you will have speaking, you’ll want it to say something you don’t know like a variable or the results of a formula.

play-notes A“!$([datetime]::now)“ C

So you can get all these functions together at poshcode. ( Script | Download )  . We’ll time will tell if this will stay a habit of mine or be a fad. Additionally if you wanted to take this seriously you’d probably want to use something better than console.beep , maybe you’d use a full on MOD engine like http://fmod.org/ and having it running iringn a different process, and have a very cpu lightweight IPC going on, and different threads could play different channels, so between threads you could debug via Chords if you really have the ear for it.

WARNING, NOT A CUBICLE FRIENDLY DEBUGGING TECHNIQUE WITHOUT HEADPHONES UNLESS YOU WANT YOUR COLLEGUES TO DEBUG YOU.

Enjoy,

Karl

Script @ PoshCode: View Script | Download

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—-

# PowerSmug photo sync script v1.0
# This PowerShell script will syncronize a folder of images with a users SmugMug account
# Please set the appropriate variables in the User Defined Variables region
# For more information visit http://shelltools.wik.is/Other_Projects/PowerSmug
#
# Images are uploaded to a gallery with the same name as the folder they are contained in.
# All folders below the Photo Directory path and the images they contain will be uploaded to SmugMug
# Folders that end in _ are ignored, so if you don't want to sync a folder with SmugMug, just add an underscore at the end
#
# Copyright 2008 Shell Tools, LLC

#Region User Defined Variables

$ApiKey = 'uVUvCbXP3f6MgO9wIRJn21YCIgEidVly'
$EmailAddress = '[SmugMug Email]'
$Password = '[SmugMug Password]'
$PhotoDirectory = '[Path To Photos]'
$filesToInclude = @('*.jpg','*.png','*.tif','*.cr2')
$worldSearchable = 1
$smugSearchable = 1

# Professional Accounts Only
$watermark=0
$watermarkId=0

#Email Variables
$smtpServer = '[SMTP Server]'
$smtpUser = '[SMTP User]'
$smtpPassword = '[SMTP Password]'
$smtpFrom = 'PowerSmug@shelltools.net'

#EndRegion

#Region Global Variables

$baseUrl = 'http://api.smugmug.com/hack/rest/1.2.0/'
$userAgent = 'PowerSmug v1.0'
$logFile = 'PowerSmug.log'
$script:SessionId = $null
$script:startStringState = $false
$script:valueState = $false
$script:arrayState = $false
$script:saveArrayState = $false
$script:datFileDirty = $false
$script:datFile = @()
$script:albumList = $null
$script:imageList = $null

#EndRegion

#region Helper Functions

function SendEmail([string] $to, [string] $subject, [string] $msg)
{
    $smtpMail = new-Object System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient $smtpServer
    $smtpMail.DeliveryMethod = [System.Net.Mail.SmtpDeliveryMethod]'Network'
    $smtpMail.Credentials = new-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential $smtpUser, $smtpPassword

    $smtpMail.Send($smtpFrom, $to, $subject, $msg)
}

function Get-MD5([System.IO.FileInfo] $file = $(Throw 'Usage: Get-MD5 [System.IO.FileInfo]'))
{
    # This Get-MD5 function sourced from:
    # http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2006/04/25/583225.aspx
    $stream = $null;
    $cryptoServiceProvider = [System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider];
    $hashAlgorithm = new-object $cryptoServiceProvider
    $stream = $file.OpenRead();
    $hashByteArray = $hashAlgorithm.ComputeHash($stream);
    $stream.Close();

    ## We have to be sure that we close the file stream if any exceptions are thrown.
    trap
    {
        if ($stream -ne $null) { $stream.Close(); }
        break;
    }

    # Convert the MD5 hash to Hex
    $hashByteArray | foreach { $result += $_.ToString("X2") }

    return $result
}

function SendWebRequest([string]$method, $queryParams, $ssl = $false)
{
    $url = $baseUrl
    if ($ssl -eq $true) {
        $url = $url.Replace("http", "https")
    }

    $url += "?method=$method"

    foreach ($key in $queryParams.Keys) {
        $url += "&$key=" + $queryParams[$key]
    }

    $wc = New-Object Net.WebClient

    $wc.Headers.Add("user-agent", $userAgent)
    [xml]$webResult = $wc.DownloadString($url)

    CheckResponseForError $webResult

    return $webResult.rsp
}

# Adds image information to our data file
function AddFile ([System.IO.FileInfo]$file, $smugId) { 

    $a = 1 | Select-Object Name, SmugId, LastModifiedTime;
    $a.Name = $file.Name
    $a.SmugId = $smugId
    $a.LastModifiedTime = $file.LastWriteTimeUtc.ToString()

    $script:datFile += $a
#    $script:datFileDirty = $true

    #we are now saving the file after each upload to prevent duplicates when there is a failure
    AppendDataFile $datFilePath $a
}

# writes the data file to the local directory
# each directory will have a data file with information for images contained in it
function SaveDataFile($filePath, $clearFile=$true)
{
    if ($script:datFileDirty -eq $false) { $script:datFile = @(); return }

    [System.IO.File]::Delete($filePath)

    $sortedFile = $script:datFile | sort-Object -property Name
    $sortedFile | Export-Csv $filePath 

    $script:datFileDirty = $false

    # mark the file as hidden
    ls $filePath | foreach { $_.Attributes = $_.Attributes -bor [System.IO.FileAttributes]::Hidden }

    if ($clearFile -eq $true) {
        # clear the variable
        $script:datFile = @()
    }
}

# appends a new row to the data file
function AppendDataFile($filePath, $record)
{
    if (test-Path $datFilePath) {
        $newLine = [System.String]::Format('{0},{1},"{2}"', $a.Name, $a.SmugId, $a.LastModifiedTime)
        Add-Content $filePath $newLine
    }
    else
    {
        $script:datFileDirty = $true
        SaveDataFile $filePath $false
    }
}

# ensure our web request was successful
function CheckResponseForError($xmlResponse)
{
    if ($xmlResponse.rsp.stat -eq 'fail')    {
        throw $webResult.rsp.err.msg
    }
}

#endregion

#region Login/Logout

function Login()
{
    if ($script:SessionId -ne $null) { return }

    $ht = @{APIKey=$ApiKey;EmailAddress=$EmailAddress;Password=$Password}
    $loginResult = SendWebRequest "smugmug.login.withPassword" $ht $true

    if ($loginResult.stat -eq "ok") {
        $script:SessionId = $loginResult.Login.Session.id
    }
    else {
        Throw "Error on login: " + $loginResult.Message
    }
}

function Logout()
{
    if ($script:SessionId -eq $null) { return }

    $ht = @{SessionID=$script:SessionId}
    $logoutResult = SendWebRequest "smugmug.logout" $ht
}

#endregion

#region Images

# this method is only needed if we cannot find the PowerSmug.dat file.
# preventing us from uploading duplicate images
function GetImage($name, $album)
{
    Login 

    $image = $script:imageList.Images | Where-Object { $_.FileName -eq $name }
    if ($image -ne $null) { return $image }

    # we are using heavy because we need the file name
    $ht = @{SessionID=$script:SessionId;AlbumID=$album.id;Heavy=1;AlbumKey=$album.Key}
    [xml]$script:imageList = SendWebRequest "smugmug.images.get" $ht

    return $script:imageList.Images.Image | Where-Object { $_.FileName -eq $name }
}

function UploadFile($file, $albumName)
{
    $album = GetAlbum $albumName
    # $image = GetImage $file.Name $album    
    # if ($image -ne $null) { return $image.id }

    $url = "http://upload.smugmug.com/" + $file.Name

    $wc = New-Object Net.WebClient

    $hash = Get-MD5 $file

    $wc.Headers.Add("user-agent", $userAgent)
    $wc.Headers.Add("ContentMd5", $hash)
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-FileName", $file.Name)
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-AlbumID", $album.id)
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-SessionID", $script:SessionId)
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-Version", "1.2.0")
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-ResponseType", "REST")
    $webResult = $wc.UploadFile($url, "PUT", $file.FullName)
    [xml]$webResult = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($webResult)

    CheckResponseForError $webResult

    return $webResult.rsp.Image.id
}

function UploadExistingFile($file, $id)
{
    Login 

    $url = "http://upload.smugmug.com/" + $file.Name

    $wc = New-Object Net.WebClient

    $hash = Get-MD5 $file

    $wc.Headers.Add("user-agent", $userAgent)
    $wc.Headers.Add("ContentMd5", $hash)
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-FileName", $file.Name)
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-ImageID", $id)
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-SessionID", $script:SessionId)
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-Version", "1.2.0")
    $wc.Headers.Add("X-Smug-ResponseType", "REST")
    $webResult = $wc.UploadFile($url, "PUT", $file.FullName)

    [xml]$webResult = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($webResult)

    CheckResponseForError $webResult

    return $webResult.rsp
}

#endregion

#region Album

function GetAlbumList($forceRefresh=$false) {
    Login

    if ($forceRefresh -eq $false) {
        if ($script:albumList -ne $null) { return }
    }

    $ht = @{SessionID=$script:SessionId}
    $script:albumList = SendWebRequest "smugmug.albums.get" $ht
}

function GetAlbum($name)
{
    #before we create an album ensure it doesn't already exist
    GetAlbumList

    $album = $script:albumList.Albums.Album | Where-Object { $_.Title -eq $name }
    if ($album -ne $null) { return $album } 

    Write-Host "Creating album: $name"
    $ht = @{SessionID=$script:SessionId;Title=$name;CategoryID=0;Public=0;
    X2Larges=0;X3Larges=0;Originals=0;Watermarking=$watermark;
    WatermarkID=$watermarkId;WorldSearchable=$worldSearchable;SmugSearchable=$smugSearchable}
    $result = SendWebRequest "smugmug.albums.create" $ht

    # be sure we refresh the album list after creation
    GetAlbumList $true

    return $result.Album
}

#endregion

#region Process File

function ProcessFile([System.IO.FileInfo]$file, $albumName)
{
    $photoObject = $script:datFile | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq $file.Name }

    if ($photoObject -ne $null) {
        if ($photoObject.LastModifiedTime -ne $file.LastWriteTimeUtc.ToString()) {
            # file has been modified, so re-upload the file
            write-Host "Updating existing file: " $file.FullName
            UploadExistingFile $file $photoObject.SmugId
            $photoObject.LastModifiedTime = $file.LastWriteTimeUtc.ToString()

            # mark the dat file as dirty so it will be saved after processing this folder
            $script:datFileDirty = $true
        }
    }
    else {
        #file doesn't exist in local file, upload to SmugMug
        write-Host "Uploading new file: " $file.FullName
        $id = UploadFile $file $albumName
        AddFile $file $id
    }
}

#endregion

#region Main Script

# this section will look through all sub-directories of $PhotoDirectory and upload the images to SmugMug
Get-ChildItem -recurse $PhotoDirectory | Where-Object { $_.Attributes -band [System.IO.FileAttributes]::Directory } | foreach {
    # don't process folders that end in _
    if ($_.FullName.EndsWith("_") -eq $false) {
        $datFilePath = $_.FullName + "\PowerSmug.dat"
        if (test-Path $datFilePath) {
            # casting as array to ensure we have an array returned
            [array]$script:datFile = import-Csv $datFilePath
        }

        $albumName = $_.FullName.Remove(0, $PhotoDirectory.Length).Trim('\')

        $path = $_.FullName + "\*"
        foreach ($file in get-ChildItem $path -include $filesToInclude) {
            ProcessFile $file $albumName
        }
        SaveDataFile $datFilePath
        $script:imageList = $null
    }
}

Logout

$date = Get-Date
Write-Host "Script Completed: $date"

trap [Exception] {
        $date = Get-Date
        $Msg = $date.ToString() + " ; " + $_.Exception.GetType().FullName + " ; " + $_.Exception.Message
        Add-Content $logFile $Msg
        SendEmail $EmailAddress "PowerSmug Error" $Msg
        break
    }

#endregion

—–

So here is a screenshot of PowerShell Analyzer running with PowerShell V2 CTP3. The new features are all related to the help features of advanced Functions.

• Region support for multiline comments <# #>
• Syntax Coloring for help documenting keywords (i.e.  .DESCRIPTION )
• Code Completion for help documenting keywords.
• Rich Rendering of advanced function help from get-help in HTML (any advanced function that is in the RunSpace)

So there. you go. However the help rendering is only in our really old 3 year old Help rendering engine. If you like it wait for our HelpFusion app which will be separate and be able to be used independently or from any PowerShell host. Some of you have seen it, but the rest of you will have to wait until we finish rewriting it for WPF.

Karl

This is your Admin Life

And you open the door and you step inside
We’re inside our servers

Now imagine that that Blue Screen is a white ball of healing light
That’s right, that exception itself is a white ball of healing light

I don’t think so

This is your job , Good to the last cpu cycle.
It doesn’t get any better than this.
This is your job and its ending one click at a time.

This isn’t your favourite tech conference. This isn’t no geek class.
Where you are now, you can’t even imagine what the bottom will be like
Only after disaster, will your server need resurrected.
Its only after you’ve lost everything that you’ll learn to script anything.
Nothing is static, everything is Dynamic
Without no agile script, it’s all falling apart.

This is your job.
(Without PowerShell)
It doesn’t get any better than this.
This is your job
And its ending one click at a time.

You are not a beautiful and unique engineer.
You are the same decaying GUI based admin  as everybody else.
We are all part of the same time consuming life draining Slavehood
We are the all cringing,ever working info-saviours of the world

You are not your dollarstore tech certification.
You are not your Antivirus failure.
You are not your dumbed down GUI management tools.

You are not your HR employee primary key
You are not your Active Directory login.
You are not your CIO’s latest tech fad.
You are not your hungover 70′s unix shell script.

You have to Code PowerShell.
You have to Code PowerShell.

You have to realize that someday GUI admins will be unemployed
Until you know that, you are useless.

I say never let me be GUI dependant
I say may I never be content.
I say deliver me from MMC console ripoffs.
I say deliver me from VBscript.
I say deliver me from misunderestimating linux zealots.
I say you have to PowerShell
I saw grow, and let the scripts run where they may

This is your job.
(Without PowerShell)
It doesn’t get any better than this.
This is your job
And its ending one click at a time.

You have to Code PowerShell
You have to Code PowerShell

I want you to script me as hard as you can.
I want you to script me as hard as you can.

Welcome to #powershell Club. If this is your first night, you have to code.

Enjoy – Karl

However Microsoft in their wisdom has made ISE rather extensible through the $PSISE variable, and many people already have added some very cool functionality to ISE through these.

When I first demo’d what was then MSH analyzer to Microsoft back in the first few months of 2006, the feature that seemed to stand out the most to the team was the ability to select an area of code and just run that. Thankfully that level of execution control is now in ISE as F6, but I wanted more, so i’m going to share with you a script that build a few months ago to add a couple of features.

F7 run the current physical line.

this basically will run the line where the caret current is at.

Real Time Strategy like control.. CTRL 1 , CTRL 2 etc

This here allows you to use comments to create regions, then EXECUTE those regions with a simple hotkey. I use this extensively. Often i am working on building a function, so I edit the function, press Ctrl 1 to apply the function, then if that was successful, press Ctrl 2 , then maybe Ctrl 3 to run some tests to make sure my changes to the function are what i am expecting.

This gives me a great AGILITY , putting what Jeffery Snover calls the Admin Development Model , but which is really REPL(Repeat Evaluate, Print , Loop ) rediscovered, on agile steroids.

function invoke-caretline
{
invoke-expression $([Regex]::Split($psISE.CurrentOpenedFile.Editor.text,"`r`n" )[$psISE.CurrentOpenedFile.Editor.caretline-1])
}
$psISE.CustomMenu.Submenus.Add("Run single line", {invoke-caretline} ,  'f7')
function invoke-region([int] $num)
{
$ed = $psISE.CurrentOpenedFile.Editor
$lines = [Regex]::Split($ed.text,"`r`n" )
$foundfirst = -1
$foundlast = -1
for($count = 0;$count -le $lines.length-1;$count++)
 {
   if ($lines[$count].startswith("#region") -and $lines[$count].contains("@$num"))
   { $foundfirst = $count;break}
 }
 if($foundfirst -gt -1)
 {
 for ($count = $foundfirst; $count -le $lines.length-1;$count++)
    {
    if ($lines[$count].startswith("#endregion") )
   { $foundlast = $count;break}
    } 

 if ($foundlast -gt -1)
   {
     $torun = ""
     $lines[$foundfirst..$foundlast] | % { $torun+=$_ + "`r`n"}
     invoke-expression $torun
   }
 } 

}
 $psISE.CustomMenu.Submenus.Add("run region 1", {invoke-region 1 },  'ctrl+1')
 $psISE.CustomMenu.Submenus.Add("run region 2", {invoke-region 2 },  'ctrl+2')
 $psISE.CustomMenu.Submenus.Add("run region 3", {invoke-region 3 },  'ctrl+3')
 $psISE.CustomMenu.Submenus.Add("run region 4", {invoke-region 4 },  'ctrl+4')
 $psISE.CustomMenu.Submenus.Add("run region 5", {invoke-region 5 },  'ctrl+5') 

Script @ PoshCode: View Script | Download

Sometime I’ll wrap all this up into a module, and add other PowerShell Analyzer-like functionality such as running the current PARAGRAPH. So often in an earlier PSA, and in SQL Query Analyzer, i’m highlighting again and again the SAME paragraph query and running it over and over again. Being able to just run the current paragraph saves that time.

Technorati Tags: powershell,shelltools,ISE,powershell analyzer

SURVEY: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pgTpVBomNgDwUA9uQNRKAbw&hl=en

Taking an app from an internal application to a shrink-wrap ready for
the masses state is a lot of work, and updating/supporting/marketting
a product even more so. So after the huge sucess of PowerShell Plus
which is now safe in Idera’s hands we need your help to decide what we
are going to release next. We plan to release some free projects, even
some opensource apps, but will likely look at productizing a project
so we can continue to feed our families. Please take the time to take
our survey

—–
As many of you know, PowerShell Plus has been a great success and is
now developed and sold by Idera, and we’ve made PowerShell Analyzer
100% free!. Despite PowerShell Analyzer not having much active
development done for almost 2 years, surprisingly it is still very
popular with a large user base. Based on your feedback and the
following thoughts we need to decide where to invest our development
time, and which internal prototypes to bring to the community.
•       We have invested a lot into PowerShell Plus, from vision and
incubation to a mature product and we don’t want to compete in the
marketplace directly with PowerShell Plus.
•       PowerShell editors are now a generic commodity. In addition to
the awesome PowerShell plus. There are many free “good enough”
solutions, including some open source ones, Microsoft’s upcoming
Graphical PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment and some other
“lower common denominator” solutions that are still free.
•       We have created and continue to innovate PowerShell technology
that can live just as well outside an editor product as in one.

There are many questions on here. Feel free to not answer them all,
it’s the top questions that are most important to us, but the more you
fill in, the happier you’ll make us.

SURVEY: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pgTpVBomNgDwUA9uQNRKAbw&hl=en

-Karl

With the phenomenal success of PowerShell Plus and subsequent transfer to Idera, PowerShell Analyzer is now 100% free. You can read more and get it from our recently updated website – http://www.shelltools.net . In coming weeks we are going to do some surveys to help decide where we want to go as a company with PowerShell IDEs.

Sincerely,

Karl

Background

So what’s stopping PowerShell or practically anything from being portable? dependence on a particular file structure and the registry. Basically the technique I  “HOOK” apis so that whenever the process tries to call certain APIs (the filesystem and registry ones) the code in memory is changed to jump to custom code instead of the address of the DLL function export where DLL has been loaded. From there custom checks are done to see if its a file or registry setting to do with PowerShell, and if so the code delivers it up, as if it were there, even though its not.

This is a technique that as a programmer I have been doing for a long time. It involves a lot of assembler, historically being able to inject a DLL into a process and in memory rewrite the code, but it works great. The first time I worked out this technique as a programmer was back in the days of windows 95 which wasn’t unicode. I made an application that could enable Chinese and Japanese characters on english windows. Effectively I hooked the TextOut API, and if it was a process that had been chosen to say display in Japanese, and the font chosen was one that was chosen for this purpose then I custom drew the Japanese or Chinese Glyph otherwise I just called the real TextOut API call. Another technique when working on VisualJockey many years ago, I wanted to be able to pipe the output on a standalone graphics program into VisualJockey so we could do some video processing on it. The problem is that app drew to fullscreen directX itself, so I had to “hook” the directX apis, so that when it created the surface it didn’t make it fullscreen, and when it rendered it rendered to Texture instead of screen, and then some extra code to retrieve what it had rendered. Another Situation was changing a DB backend of an application without the Applications source, *simply* by hooking the ODBC apis (where we also could discover the password used). Another thing I used this technique for was to add some functionality to abandoned freeware that had no source code.

Fast forward to about 2002, Josua Honger , the main architect of VisualJockey, and also the Hippotiser (I could talk a week just about these amazing programs, the Hippotiser has gone on to become a huge sensation powering realtime effects for live T.V, large concerts, events like the nobel peace prize, broadway shows, and the worlds largest audiovisual setup- Love by Cirque de Soliel in Las Vegas)  were wanting to use the engine of VisualJockey to make a demoscene demo , without the copy protection , and in a portable manner (Demoscene demos aren’t allowed to install anything), and on top of that not scare the Green Hippo (who recently purchased the VisualJockey engine and didn’t want to risk it getting out and reused). We didn’t have time to roll our own solution so we found a rather recent product called Thinstall. Thinstall used the techniques mentioned about, but it stored all the files you choose in its own encrypted virtual file system inside one file – Just what we were needing. Thinstall in those days also was cheap enough for us, even though it was a hobby project, but as a young product it didn’t quite work fully with our VisualJockey because we used some interesting techniques anyhow, but I did gain a lot of respect for it, and for its author Jonathan Clark. Over the years I’ve played with it a few times for some hobby projects , but the cost went up and up and I couldn’t justify using it.

Fast forward to 2008, the complexities and risks of deploying and configuring applications have become a real pain point for many corporations and an abundance of solutions have tried solving this. Thinstall evolved its PR to target this market – and named it Application Virtualization, and most recently got acquired by VMWARE. (and renamed ThinApp) So now that there was a great beta to try. the scary thing is HOW EASY THIS WAS. I expected that I would have to spend many hours manually tweaking what to include/exclude – setting up the behaviour of the registry virtualization, but I had something done in 20 minutes, pretty much just following a few instructions. and Click next / next /next

HOW HOW HOW HOW HOW HOW HOW HOW

So I wanted to make 4 different versions of Portable Powershell

• Powershell V1 (just powershell, don’t include dotnet 2.0 – thus dotnet 2.0 is needed to be installed on a machine for it to work)
• Powershell V2 CTP2 (just powershell, don’t include dotnet 2.0 – thus dotnet 2.0 is needed to be installed on a machine for it to work)
• PowerShell V1 (include the who dotnet 2.0 so it can run even where dotnet isn’t)
• PowerShell V1 (include the who dotnet 2.0 so it can run even where dotnet isn’t)

The Key this is to have a Fresh OS to start from, so that you don’t miss any important files , and don’t get rubbish either, so the place to build this is most definately in a VM.

So what did i do?

1. Predownloaded what was needed
   1. XP SP2 install CD
   2. VMWARE THINAPP BETA (plus free beta key)
   3. DOTNET 2.0 redistributable
   4. Powershell V1 for XP installer
   5. Powershell V2 CTP2 installer
2. Setup the OS in a VM.
3. Installed ThinAPP
4. Made a snapshot of the VM
5. started the thinapp process
6. Installed dotnet 2.0
7. Installed PowerShell V2CTP2
8. Copied over PowerShell Analyzer
9. Completed the thinapp process , and build the Portable EXE for my V2 with dotnet Portable Powershell
10. Copied my portable powerShell off the VM
11. Reverted the snapshot
12. Repeated the process but for PowerShell V1
13. Reverted the snapshot
14. Installed dotnet 2.0
15. Made a new snapshot
16. repeated the process but just installing Powershell V1 (to make a smaller less heavy portable powershell that didn’t contain dotnet 2.0)
17. reverted and repeated the process for Powershell V2

There there you have it, 4 different flavors on a Portable Powershell made in just a few hours. I can’t give them enough praise for how far Thinstall has come and how easy the process was.

Are there any other options?

Definately! Thinstall is not the sole player in this now “application virtualization” arena. The management , configuration and deployment has been bundled into apps and called “Application Streaming“. Citrix added Application Streaming, Symantec has Altiris, and Microsoft bought out SoftGrid. The “streaming techniques aren’t typically really portable since they have some sort of agent or client/server architecture but the interesting one in this mix is software, Which i think is now renamed Microsoft Application Virtualization or APP-V for short. You can read their blog here. Actually the release candidate was just released YESTERDAY.

With thinstall, I’m interesting what the pricing is going to be under VMWARE. When its in beta its definitely financially feasible for me to have my own personal portable powershell for personal use, but that’s probably not the case post RTM.

I didn’t have time to play with APP-V yet. SO MUCH CHALLENGE IS WILL SOMEBODY TRY TO VIRTUALIZE POWERSHELL WITH APP-V AND TELL US HOW IT GOES. I presume Microsoft will be more likely to allow redistribution of PowerShell through one of their own technologies

Another cheap option I would challenge somebody is to try it in sandboxie , see if sandboxie is up to the job, as its very cheap, but i don’t know if it does full “portable”

Finally there is another way, that I might implement, and that is roll my own. I wouldn’t include the dotnet framework in this one (just too much work), but I can whip up a DLL in C++ and Assembler in no time to take care of powershell’s filesystem and registry needs. Of course I couldn’t redistribute portable PowerShell but I could make it into a small PORTABLEPOWERSHELLBUILDER.EXE app, that has a button that will build a portable PowerShell for you on any computer that has PowerShell installed in a similar manner to how BartPE or ReatogoXPE can build a bootable XP CD based on the files on a particular OS install.

Apart from the challenge of doing that, and doing some fun techniques that I’ve almost forgotten, and as a PowerShell tool vendor and partner of MS, I don’t want to do that. I want MS to allow PowerShell to be redistributed, in a portable manner, and if they can fit it into their schedule, do some minor reachitecture of PowerShell V2 to be naturally portable, but more on that in my next blog post.

Over and Out,

Karl Prosser / ShellTools

Technorati Tags: portable PowerShell,powershell,shelltools,thinapp,app-v

So I’ve loved portable apps from time memorial and have valued making my own apps as portable as possible – XCOPY friendly. I’ve valued this over some fancy installer. But what about PowerShell? Why can’t PowerShell be portable. Its the sort of tool that begs to be portable. Admins want a power tool, like powershell to be portable, to be able to be run on any computer without installing anything (changing ,even contaminating the state of the computer). Admins don’t want to have to worry about installing prerequisites such as dotnet 2.0 everywhere and neither do I. I want something that can be self contained , where I can run PowerShell v1 and v2 side by side if I choose, and as a builder of PowerShell hosts, I want to be able to embed, or distribute the PowerShell runtime along with my app, just like I can with a multitude of dotnet libraries and components.

Well is this possible. Yes, I’ve done it. In this blog post I’ll show some screenshots and a video about it, and talk about the WHAT and the WHY, and try to whelm up some passion in the community to encourage Microsoft to allow the PowerShell engine to be redistributed freely, easily , and portably. I know that many people will ask me – Can I download this, and I have to say NO – because we don’t have rights from MS to redistribute PowerShell, especially outside of its official packages, but the good news is that you can make this yourself, but I’m not going to tell you HOW to until tomorrow, hoping that instead of running of to recreate your own personal PowerShell nirvana you might read the rest of my rant and join the movement for a Microsoft endorsed Portable PowerShell.

But before we proceed here is a screenshot:

This beauty shows Server Core Enterprise – you can verify this isn’t a trick but is indeed server core by the operatingsystemSKU of 14 shown in the top window. (MSDN reference. ) Server Core does not have dotnet 2.0 (a prerequisite of PowerShell) installed and we haven’t applied any cool hacks or Russian reverse engineering  to get it working therefore we haven’t compromised the secure state of our servercore by installing any untested potential lasting security hole on it. We purely XCOPY across our files, or we can even run it off a USB drive. Another great benefit you see here is on the same machine we are running PowerShell V1 and V2 side by side. How many of us have had to set up a whole new machine or VM just to play with V2 CTP!!!!! and how many cough*cough have installed v2 on a production machine when we should have for lack of patience in setting up a dedicated v2 test machine?

So what are the features of this technique.

• Fully Portable
• versions that presume dotnet 2.0s preexistence (about 3MB to 10MB)
• Versions that don’t need dotnet 2.0 at all (about 100MB)
• Can run V1 and V2 side by side.
• Can run on a machine with PowerShell already installed, and your portable version has its own execution-policy and other settings.
• Can be packaged with SnapIns (so the SnapIns are portable also, no need to install or register them).
• Can be used with a custom Host , so you can have a Portable PowerShell Plus or PowerShell Analyzer.

Here is a 3 minute video showing Portable Powershell v1 and v2 and PowerShell Analyzer running side by side on a virgin XP SP2 box that doesn’t have dotnet 2.0 preinstalled.

Portable PowerShell from karl prosser on Vimeo.

So now you are saying, GIVE THIS TO ME NOW. Sorry but I can’t but in my next blog entry within a couple of days I will tell you how you can roll your own Portable PowerShell.

Please leave a comment on this blog if you are in favor of Microsoft relaxing its redistributable rules when it comes to PowerShell. Technically PowerShell doesn’t have much to stop it being Portable. Its fully dotnet, and although its installed in windows\system32 directory that is more a “political” feature , earlier betas would install elsewhere, and technically it wouldn’t be hard to make it a control in VS.NET that a custom host could merge into their project and be fully portable. There are many many possible use-cases for such portable uses  (both from the perspective of admins as well as developers creating PowerShell enabled and powered applications in the growing PowerShell ecosystem). If MS can’t make any changes technically to make it as easy as i suggest in V2, can they at least GIVE FULL REDISTRIBUTABLE RIGHTS FOR POWERSHELL as they do things such as the SQL server client side report viewer control in VS.NET.

All in favor say so in a comment!

And come back for more in a day or two.

Over and Out,

Karl Prosser / ShellTools.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Portable PowerShell,dotnet,Server core,PowerShell Analyzer

Some typical ways of doing in PowerShell have been either something like the following trick:

$a = 1 | select a , b , c , d

or with using the Add-member cmdlet as below:

$a | add-member -membertype noteproperty -name status -value done

however both are really slow. There is another way to do it in script, and that is directly with the PSobject, but still PowerShell (especially version 1) has a huge overhead when creating new objects with new-object but below is an example none the less.

$obj = new-Object system.Management.Automation.PSObject

$note = new-object System.Management.Automation.PSnoteproperty "karl" , "a value"

$obj.psobject.members.add( $note );

But if you really want to do speed, or if you have need to generate these objects in a cmdlet regardless of speed here is how you can do it in C#.

public static PSObject newPsCustomObject2()

        {

            //Creating a PSobject without any parameters in the constructor creates a PSCustomObjectg

            PSObject obj = new PSObject();

            //PSNoteProperties are not strongly typed but do contain an explicit type.

            obj.Properties.Add(new PSNoteProperty("age",24));

            obj.Properties.Add(new PSNoteProperty("name","jon"));

            //Alias allow you to cast one property as another as well as just plain aliasing

            obj.Properties.Add(new PSAliasProperty("ageasstring","age",typeof(string)));

            return obj;

        }

Some notes about the above, I didn’t show how you could add ScriptProperties or ScriptMethods yet as I wanted to keep it simple and not cover creating scriptblocks. Before I go lets performance test this baby compared to creating this in pure PowerShell.

So in the:

1) first corner we have creating the object with select-object, then setting the properties.(but we can’t set the alias)

2) Creating the object with new-object, then using add-member to add all the properties.

3) calling our static method above.

#select-object version

for($i = 0;$i -lt 50000;$i++) { $a = 1 |Select-Object age, name; $a.age = 24; $a.name = "john" }

#add-member version

for($i = 0;$i -lt 50000;$i++)

  { $a = new-Object psobject;

    $a | add-member -membertype noteproperty -name age -value 24

    $a | add-member -membertype noteproperty -name name -value "john"

    $a | add-member -membertype aliasproperty -name "ageasstring" -value "age" -secondvalue "string"

  }

#Our fast version

for($i = 0;$i -lt 50000;$i++) { $a = [snapinini.newobjecthelper]::newPsCustomObject2(); }

so we are creating 50,000 objects and the results are.

and i used to complain with the performance hit of a address lookup for a method in a C++ virtual method table!!

at worst the official add-member technique is over 60 times slower than calling C#, and thats not really RAW C#, thats still powershell invoking a C# method 50,000 times, and powershell managing a loop.

if fact just to test i added another test

$a = [snapinini.newobjecthelper]::newPsCustomObject3();

where newPSCustomObject3() moves the 50,000 loop to inside C#.. and here the speed is 0.95 seconds, so about half the speed of invoking the C# method from powershell each time – this speed difference I am happy with though. The PowerShell team seem to have done a good job of invoking C# methods quickly.

Another day I should investigate the speed of creating objects that have been created with the extended type system.

I’d love if somebody can run these tests in v2.

Also sometime soon I shall share a helper function you can use to quickly generate a PScustomObject with properties and values you specify in script.

-Karl

In V1 there seems to be extreme slowdowns when invoking cmdlet, functions, any type of scriptblock and when using the pipeline. If you write a one liner that is easy to read, very elegant, but uses a lot of “powershelly” techniques its performance is often terrible, compared to it you write it out as a longer script using more traditional imperative style with “C”ish loops as the like. This brings up the whole concept of what is cheaper and more valuable – CPU cycles that keep getting cheaper, or human time in writing and maintaining code – dynamic languages and especially shells will definitely answer that programmer productivity is more valuable, and thus performance can come second.(read about it in the context of python here.) However 59 millisecond average to call an empty powershell function on a dual core machine is pushing this truth to an absurdity. PowerShell should as a language should NOT be slower than BASIC on my Commodore-64 – an 1MHZ 8 bit machine.

Here is some background of where we are coming from. Brandon Shell Started it all here. And after we spend hours running tests and bantering about the subject on the #powershell IRC room on freenode, Mow covered some cool stuff here.

Basically the results of my tests showed that new-object is very slow in V1, but calling any CMDLET, even a simple C# cmdlet with one line of code is extremely slow, and about 30 to 50 times slower than calling that SAME  line of code from powershell as a static method on a C# assembly. Additionally if you take that 50 times faster static method call, and wrap in it a simple powershell function, you loose all your spend gains and its even slower than calling the new-object CmdLet.

The great thing from Mows tests is that in V2 it seems that on the language side of things, scriptblocks,functions and the pipelines have spend up drastically (in the magnitude of about 2000% to 3000%. And cmdlet invocation has spend up also, but is about 6 times slower than just calling C# static methods. GO V2 GO V2 , but is it enough?

Given that V1 is going to be important for a long time, I think that powershell scripters need to still try to script in a “PowerShelly” way, but when they determine that something really has to be performant , they need to know what workarounds they can do in PowerShell to speed things up, understanding where the bottlenecks in PowerShell are.

But this post isn’t about those performance solutions – I’m sure that we will cover a lot of them over the coming of the months. I want to RANT.

One of the reasons I think PowerShell has so many language quirks (and thus related gotchas when learning to do advanced stuff and solving bugs) is because it is Defined by Implementation instead of being Defined by Specification. To be honest, PowerShell is more of a platform , than a language or even a shell, and as it brings some new ideas and melds existing ideas in totally new ways, almost experimental ways, I don’t think it could have been defined any other way. However its quirks and yes also its performance is a result of that. I believe it needs to be reviewed by traditional language designers and not be excused “because its a shell language”. I believe that the importance of PowerShell is growing phenomenally and being part of Microsoft’s common engineering requirement I strongly believe such close working with the CLR team should be done, and even if PowerShell is defined by Implementation and will likely be in version 2 also – SPEND THE TIME TO AT LEAST DEFINE THE SPECIFICATION, DOCUMENT THE INTENDED (and thus real) BEHAVIOUR, RELEASE A FULL GRAMMAR, RELEASE OFFICIAL XSD SCHEMAS of the XML ELEMENTS, and if specification is what defines it, and that specification is best represented in the automated unit tests – maybe , just maybe even release such tests  , as per other dynamic languages. I think some of this stuff should at least be done BEFORE V2 is released. I mean getting a V2 and not even having a V1 grammar. </end of rant>

Disclaimer:

Despite the above concerns, I love PowerShell, and the general performance doesn’t bother me. Being able to code at the speed of thought, and do things with far less code than C#, and do things interactively and dynamically totally win out. PowerShell does introduce many new tangents on concepts and mash together some amazing things, its amazing they got it as right as they did the first time. I know if I had implemented such a platform/language it would be less consistent and probably slower than a ZX81. PowerShell V2, even though only in CTP2 already shows great performance enhancements.

If that disclaimer gave you the warm fuzzies, don’t get too comfortable, i have another pet peeve to blog about, and that is the fallacy called “Restricted Runspaces” and how the lack of being able to truly sandbox PowerShell has me running in the direction of IronRuby – But that’s for another day.

-Karl / Shell Tools

So how does this work?

1) you have to load an assembly into memory in powershell that contains your snapin.
2) you add the cmdlets directly into the runspace that is running and tell powershell to update its list of cmdlets.

Here is the C# code for a sample barebones SnapInini.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using System.Management.Automation;

using System.Management.Automation.Runspaces;

namespace Snapinini

{

    public class DynamicCmdLet

    {

        public static void Load()

        {

            CmdletConfigurationEntry conf = new CmdletConfigurationEntry("dummy-cmdlet", typeof(ForeachDictionaryCmdLet), null);

            Runspace.DefaultRunspace.RunspaceConfiguration.Cmdlets.Append(conf);

            Runspace.DefaultRunspace.RunspaceConfiguration.Cmdlets.Update();

            Runspace.DefaultRunspace.CreateNestedPipeline(

                "new-alias dcmd dummy-cmdlet; write-host 'snapinini loaded'",

                false).Invoke();

        }

    }

    [Cmdlet("dummy", "cmdlet")]

    public class ForeachDictionaryCmdLet : System.Management.Automation.PSCmdlet

    {

        protected override void EndProcessing()

        {

            WriteObject("hello from the dummy cmdlet");

        }

    }

}

In the above sample I have a very very simple cmdlet. You can see that i get the defaultrunspace, go into its RunspaceConfiguration and add the cmdlets and update the list. I am additionally running some powershell script that adds an alias to the cmdlet and writes a message to the screen just as an example showing you that you can do more stuff if you wish. In the above code the load is a static method so its easy to call from powershell once you’ve loaded the assembly, but in all honesty the Load() code could just as well have been written in the calling PowerShell.

So how do we load and use this in PowerShell?

[system.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("snapinini.dll")

[snapinini.DynamicCmdLet]::load()

dummy-cmdlet

dcmd

Where to from here? This example is very simple, you could easily add multiple cmdlets into the equation, specify help files, add custom type definitions etc. Another thing I had experimented with is taking a real snapin and using reflection to see the cmdlets in it and adding them directly, however unless you know exactly what a snapin does this is dangerous because in its registration it might set up a bunch of other things also that are important.

Another thing I should cover next time is a safe way to load assemblies from any location and ensure that all their references get resolved seamlessly.

-Karl

So how does this work?

1) you have to load an assembly into memory in powershell that contains your snapin.
2) you add the cmdlets directly into the runspace that is running and tell powershell to update its list of cmdlets.

Here is the C# code for a sample barebones SnapInini.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using System.Management.Automation;

using System.Management.Automation.Runspaces;

namespace Snapinini

{

    public class DynamicCmdLet

    {

        public static void Load()

        {

            CmdletConfigurationEntry conf = new CmdletConfigurationEntry("dummy-cmdlet", typeof(ForeachDictionaryCmdLet), null);

            Runspace.DefaultRunspace.RunspaceConfiguration.Cmdlets.Append(conf);

            Runspace.DefaultRunspace.RunspaceConfiguration.Cmdlets.Update();

            Runspace.DefaultRunspace.CreateNestedPipeline(

                "new-alias dcmd dummy-cmdlet; write-host 'snapinini loaded'",

                false).Invoke();

        }

    }

    [Cmdlet("dummy", "cmdlet")]

    public class ForeachDictionaryCmdLet : System.Management.Automation.PSCmdlet

    {

        protected override void EndProcessing()

        {

            WriteObject("hello from the dummy cmdlet");

        }

    }

}

In the above sample I have a very very simple cmdlet. You can see that i get the defaultrunspace, go into its RunspaceConfiguration and add the cmdlets and update the list. I am additionally running some powershell script that adds an alias to the cmdlet and writes a message to the screen just as an example showing you that you can do more stuff if you wish. In the above code the load is a static method so its easy to call from powershell once you’ve loaded the assembly, but in all honesty the Load() code could just as well have been written in the calling PowerShell.

So how do we load and use this in PowerShell?

[system.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("snapinini.dll")

[snapinini.DynamicCmdLet]::load()

dummy-cmdlet

dcmd

Where to from here? This example is very simple, you could easily add multiple cmdlets into the equation, specify help files, add custom type definitions etc. Another thing I had experimented with is taking a real snapin and using reflection to see the cmdlets in it and adding them directly, however unless you know exactly what a snapin does this is dangerous because in its registration it might set up a bunch of other things also that are important.

Another thing I should cover next time is a safe way to load assemblies from any location and ensure that all their references get resolved seamlessly.

-Karl

function get-psVersion

{

if ((get-Variable psversiontabl[e]) -eq $null)

   {

     new-Object system.Version "1.0.0.0"

   }

   else

    {

    $psversiontable.psversion

    }

}

-Karl

The difference between our beta and 1.0 release is our commitment to our customers. We have disabled the auto-updating functionality because we only want to push out builds that have been widely tested to customers – however for those who like to live on the edge of innovation , we will continue to give access to our latest builds. In the future also we will update our auto-updating technology to allow you to choose to update to either trusted official releases, and latest builds.

Another difference in 1.0 is now we also have a MSI installer for those inclined. We are careful however not to ostracize those of you, like us, who value a portable application that doesn’t have to have an installer and that can be run from a thumb drive if desired. Thus PowerShell Plus 1.0 has both a portable zip, and a MSI installer.

We are discontinuing selling the PowerShell Suite, but licenses for PowerShell Analyzer and the PowerShell Suite automatically work with PowerShell Plus, and PowerShell Analyzer will continue to be available to all customers as we continue to migrate important features over to PowerShell Plus 1.1

New Price

We have lowered the price to $79 – effectively giving you an Enterprise grade application for a hobbyist price. Check it out now at our Store

Additionally PS+ has a free 30 trial and beyond that it is free for non-commercial use!

Download

• Zip file – Simply Unblock the ZIP (if downloaded with IE) , unzip and run.
• MSI installer.

Videos

Check out our videos. There is our original trailer, plus a detailed video of our debugger, which is the most feature complete PowerShell debugger around – generations ahead of anything else.

Official Blog

We are moving away from PowerShellLive and centralizing everything including our forums and blogs  around www.powershell.com . Our Official Blog is now at http://blog.powershell.com

Some Screen Shots

Here are a few screenshots to whet your appetite.

1) PowerShell Plus console with GUI code completion in MiniMode.

2) PowerShell Plus Full Console with Variables, Properties and Help Center visible while inserting a snippet directly into the console.

3) PowerShell Plus editor window showing our save pipeline object code completion.

4) Editor showing some debugging, the variable inspector and console preview, as well as code completion of the file system with file icons.

Enjoy

Our home page http://www.powershell.com may have some old information of it, but now that we have 1.0 out, we’ll get that caught up soon.

http://www.powershell.com

-Karl

http://www.powershell.com/downloads/psp1.zip

and if you happen across any bugs, we love it if you took a minute to submit them here.

Enjoy,

Karl , Tobias and Eddie / Shell Tools, LLC

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=1297816

and now i can’t find the page about Full Armor Workflow Studio on their website as before.

Interesting stuff,

Karl

In PowerShell Plus you can see Variables and properties. by enabling it from the menu (Toolbars->Variables+Property) or easily toggle it with CTRL-T

You can see it has rich features where you can search and filter different variables, then when you click on one have it show up in the property grid. However we aren’t going deep into that today. we are covering the “View Current Pipeline” option

When you click this button, it toggles from showing the variables. to the actual results of the pipeline. So whenever you run something.. the actual results are shown as usual on the left as text, but also the actual dotnet objects that are returned by the command show up in the variable pane. and when you click on an item there, you can see all the properties for that particular object.

So in the above example I ran a command that on the first 5 processes in the system, and the current date. In the variable explorer you can see those 5 processes and the date and time. Also the 2nd process has been clicked on, and you can see all its properties in the property grid, including descriptions of the properties. You get to see a lot more data than PowerShell gives you as text.

You can download Powershell Plus from http://www.powershell.com

-Karl

Technorati Tags: powershell,powershell plus,shell Tools,IDE,scripting

$a = 1 | select-object name, age , sex

$b = 1 | select-object species, name , age

$a.psobject.properties | % { $_.name } | ? {$($b.psobject.properties | % { $_.name } ) -notcontains $_ }

$b.psobject.properties | % { $_.name } | ? {$($a.psobject.properties | % { $_.name } ) -notcontains $_ }

Here we simply create a couple of objects that have some similar and different properties. then the first example shows the properties in A that aren’t in B, and the next shows the properties in B that aren’t in A.

The main trick here is .psobject … all objects have a “hidden” psobject property that contains some cool PowerShell related stuff, including the properties. There are some good blog entries around on psobject and its definitely worth a deeper look. This technique is also the basis on a script i will introduce soon, my join-object function.

-Karl

Technorati Tags: powershell

Additionally, if you have already used your 45 Day trial, we have EXTENDED it another 45 days.

PowerShell Plus is now available with a 45 Day trial as well, and Additionally its available fully free for Non Commercial use as well.

So download both of these today and Enjoy

• 
  

  PowerShell Analyzer 1.0 – Direct Download

• 
  

  PowerShell Plus Beta – Direct Download

PowerShell Analyzer Screen-shots.

To get a grasp of what PowerShell Plus can do, Check out its trailer. its about 4 minutes, and definitely worth the time in our opinion.

Technorati Tags: Powershell Analyzer,Powershell Plus,Powershell Debugging

All my old posts are gone, as far as being web pages, but I have archived them into a PDF here. Maybe I’ll revisit some of the topics in future posts if they are worthy enough.

So what’s new?

• I’ve been a PowerShell MVP for some time now.
• Shell Tools is sponsoring the PowerShell.org project. Actually I have a blog there, and was going to blog there rather than back at www.karlprosser.com/coder but I really wanted to use Live Writer, and the DotNetNuke Blog module is still substandard, so I’m just going to cross post here and there, and also at Shell Tools support site, so its searchable on this blog. I know its OVERKILL . We’ll see how it works out.
• We’ve been busy with PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShell Plus. PowerShell Analyzer 1.0 is finally out, and we have a trial of the PowerShell Plus for use in a commercial environment, and a free license for non-commercial use. Check it all out www.powershell.com
• Combined PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShell Plus downloads are now far in excess of 100,000. Yay
• The PowerShell Debugger in PowerShell Plus is getting better by the day, and the debugger in PowerShell Analyzer should add an interesting twist to the works. More on this in future posts.
• Documentation. We admit documentation for PowerShell Plus and PowerShell Analyzer is very sparse, so one of our priorities as this year wraps up is a number of Video Tutorials, and even some hard copy documentation/ tutorials  – shock , horror.

Plus I have tonnes of generic PowerShell topics inside me, bursting at the seams, just waiting to come out.

Technorati Tags: Powershell,Powershell Analyzer,Powershell Plus,Powershell debugger,Powershell Debugging,Shell Tools