Ok, CTP2 is out. This is a great news, and a lot of things to play. Newer ISE, finally fixed “killer TAB” in console, Update-Help that picks up data from network and more.
There is one thing you need to be aware of: CTP1 and CTP2 both installed at the same time is a really bad idea. Trust me, you don’t want to see it (any command results in pages and pages of errors, tab does not work, highlighting syntax in ISE is total disaster).
Creating temporary file in PowerShell is pretty simple – because you can use .NET call directly it’s a matter of:
[IO.Path]::GetTempFileName()
The problem you may walk into is the rare case when your file has to have specific extension to work properly. I usually have this issue when I try to use temporary file to create formatting/ type information at runtime. Read more…
I’ve decided that from time to time I should use this blog to write down some tiny things I came up with while working/ playing with PowerShell. My memory is leaking all the time, and once I write something down – I will be able to come back to it when needed. 
Today I had need to copy some code from blog. Having PowerShell code on the blog is pretty neat, it’s usually nicer when you add line numbers. Line numbers are handy, but if you do not use plugin that allows others to take code without them – they get extra step of removing prefixes from copied “stuff”. Today I decided that it would be wiser to have some simple function to do that for me, instead of writing some one-liner each time:
Few weeks ago I’ve discovered very strange bug in the way ‘process’ works when used in wrong context. Long story short: someone wrote function with process block, but without begin block. It’s usually OK, but he tried to put some code between param and process block and that gave him error, that is misleading at best:
function Test-BadProcess { param () # begin { $SomeVariable = 'Initial Value' # } process { "Will barf on you! Get-Process does not take scripts! ARGH!" } }
So how it looks like when you run it?
How many time have I heard this question from other PowerShell enthusiasts: “when cmd.exe is going to die”. Or at best “when will PowerShell.exe become default when user asks for command line”. It’s not so in Windows 8 Developer Preview, not sure what to expect in final release, but kind of don’t expect it to happen anytime soon. What is most frustrating for some is the fact, that server core still expects us to type “powershell.exe” once we boot.
PowerShell CTPs are great. When I started to use PowerShell on a daily basis it was already v2 CTP2. And that is the main reason why I know very little about v1 
It was just so much better experience… Same happens now with v3 CTP1. Once I saw it’s coming – I started to look for a way to get all requirements on my primary machine. I haven’t really played with stuff that is new in version 3 – like workflows. What I concentrate on is stuff that got improved from version 2. And from my perspective there are few I simply could not ignore.
It’s been a while since I wrote something on this blog. I tried to focus more on my Polish blog, because I assumed there is enough blogs in English about PowerShell. But because I would like to share this news with everybody – here it is. 🙂
Today I’ve received e-mail fro support@mvpaward.com – I was expecting it for a while. I knew that I was nominated (thanks again, Aleksandar!), I knew it was today when decision will be announced. But decision itself was surprising for me. 🙂
Bartek Bielawski, PowerShell MVP. It sound like a fairy tale to me. But it’s true. Thanks to all who helped me get that far! PowerShell Deep Dive is at my doors and I will go there as newest PowerShell MVP. That’s pure awesomeness. I’m having difficulty with touching the ground at the moment. WOW.
OK, I’m probably not the best person to blog about this. But anyway I will write this short note, so that it may safe someone else time I had wasted on trying to figure this out. Here is the story.
Machine is a member of Active Directory. So far – so good. Pretty common scenario these days. You work on it offline. Also – not so uncommon if you are lucky owner of a laptop. You plan to implement some persistent WMI event handling. So you use the best tool possible to get there (PowerEvents) that you’ve already tested in the office. It went smooth there. And that’s when ‘fun’ starts:
It’s Sunday morning and I should probably do something else than playing with PowerShell. But Chad Miller and Oisin Grehan made me dig more into way Foreach-Object behaves. I was always sure that construct like that:
1..10 | ForEach-Object { '=' * 80 } { $_ } { '-' * 80 }
work because documentation is wrong about the way –Begin and –End behave. Oisin comment forced me to actually check it… And because there is no better way to check how things actually work than by using Trace-Command cmdlet – I did so. And it proven Oisin (and documentation) to be right about parameters binding rules:
I love PowerShell. Literally it saved my behind several times, made my work on Windows 100s more fun than it was before it was shipped (or rather before I tried it and got familiar with all it’s concepts). My first meeting with scripting was bash, but it was long ago, so maybe I will miss some points in this article. But there are so many articles written by *nix experts that tried to jump in opposite direction and were disappointed, that I decided to write this thingy to maybe explain why (in my maybe not very humble opinion) that was the case.
All starts there, really. Even if folks understand concept of pipe that passes object all the way, they still try to filter, select and act on strings. It was something impossible for me to avoid in bash. I haven’t done it really ‘hardcore’ way. Only grep, awk, sed, cut, find and xargs. So it was probably just scratching the surface of what *nix shells have to offer. But I’ve seen many times same patterns applied in PowerShell by people who just refused to go all the way and change from thinking-string to thinking-objects. And if there is no grep-substitute some people get lost and blame PowerShell for it. OK, you are probably right, you spent a lot of your time and effort to find out how to play with text parsing and would like to leverage this in Windows in the same way you did on your *nix box. But there are better ways to achieve this goal (I mention it at the end). Powershell is great for filtering, but you have to see objects, even if there is text. And use cmdlets *designed* for filtering. Where-Object is very powerful and can work both with string and with full objects. So no: “Out-String | Select-String” please…
Another very common mistake I see is assuming that ‘blue box’ is Powershell. Full stop. I agree that ‘blue box’ is very limiting at times. It also has many ‘features’ that may drive people crazy. Like selecting text inside it, all that ‘Quick Edit’ modes, size that does not scale unless you tweak it using $host variable, limited number of fonts to select from… List goes on. Mine favourite ‘feature’ is Tab-killer (best option to get rid of everything after cursor is to press tab 😉 ). But there are at least 3 other hosts available for free (one out-of –the-box on Client machine and as optional feature on server). All do better job in my opinion. And there are some commercial alternatives that probably do even better than that. I personally use ISE, PoshConsole from time to time, and there is also PowerGui script editor, that can serve as console window too (greatly improved in version 2.4). If you don’t like powershell.exe – just stop using it. But don’t pretend to be powershell expert if all you did was launching this blue box and looking at features of host. Powershell is engine that maybe used in many hosts, including old and not very smart ones, like [system.console] 😉
Another thing I would like to point out. It’s unfair to compare something mature and improved over last 30 years with stuff that is still not full-featured yet. As Jeffrey Snover keeps saying all the time: Microsoft is digging itself out of the big hole, and it takes time. I would imagine it also forces PowerShell team to make some painful decisions: we won’t make this, this and that in this release. And now when PowerShell is a part of Windows as a whole the release cycle is tied to OS cycles. It forces us, PowerShell users, to wait longer for new improvements. Good part is that PowerShell team did a great job to make it possible (and pretty easy too) for community to extend functionality of PowerShell. Many requests I’ve seen from *nix folks were implemented long ago by creators of PowerShell Community Extensions (pscx) but still, some things that we (users) and team (trust me on this one) would like to see in PowerShell will take a while to complete. It does not mean that we can’t do it ourselves already (I hope to find out HOW during TechEd next week, there will be session that I simply can’t miss exactly about that) – it means that we can’t assume given functionality is available on every box, and of course it makes our life harder (WE need to check if given module is installed on box). But the fact that we can prepare some really wonderful extensions without asking Microsoft to do it makes it really great. But to have mature product – we need more time. I will wait, I’ve already see it’s worth it.
I’m windows admin for quite some time. Do you know how often do I need to parse text to solve tasks? My world is built of objects. Even text is build of objects. I need something that simplifies working with objects and makes it possible to automate object creation, usage and recording (as text, obviously, I can not read anything else unless it’s image). Folks from *nix part of the world come to windows and want to have something, that would improve their life inside it. They assume shell is only good if it’s built on text parsing, because they are used to that kind of shell scripting. Seen comments that ‘cp’ is obvious command (oh really…?). Sorry guys. You are obviously trying to convince world, that only because you spent time and learned by hard all commands and patterns from *nix shells, than Windows shell should follow same rules. I see reason why this assumption is made. When you see ‘ls’, ‘cat’, ‘cp’, ‘rm’ – you may start to think that this is just bash-clone on windows box. And it’s not the point: all those aliases are created only to allow shell users (both cmd and bash) to use some commands that we already have in memory. No way ‘cp’ is more obvious than Copy-Item. If I have no idea what Select-String does I can guess. Try guess what poo command would do? Or huhu command? And what about Get-Elevator? Show-Picture? We have many objects, our world is too complicated to study by hard all shortcuts that team producing some functionality thought were cool and easy to remember. That’s were PowerShell saves our back. We can do lucky guesses, we can Get-Command, Get-Help, we can push object all the way and Get-Member, make lucky guesses on that members too. And move on. Really, something that I would like to see everywhere.
Get-Kid | foreach { $_.Feed() } # done with breakfast 😉
Now last point. If you really want to use your bash skills when you manage Windows – you can. It’s there for quite some time, and it works fine (and I won’t argue if that is better option than Powershell – for sure it’s different). Don’t try to convince world that PowerShell has to be bash-clone. It shouldn’t be. If all you need is bash on windows – use it there. Never tried myself, but there are many folks who did Cygwin + bash and are more than happy with that couple. You may complain that it is not there by default. But why should it be? And wouldn’t part of *nix experts that spell MS as M$ complain, that Microsoft is ‘stealing’ again? I’ve seen such comments even for aliases in PowerShell. If they moved that far with something that was designed to make start in PowerShell a bit easier for people who are used to work in bash – how far would they go if Microsoft would decide to have both bash and PowerShell side by side as two alternatives? I will do easy guess: they would barf on M$, complain about it, and in the end – install cygwin + bash themselves, because there has to be something wrong with version shipped with Windows and updated using Windows Update, WSUS or SCCM. After all it’s M$, right? 😉
IT Pro PowerShell experience 