Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

Ok *Now* I'm starting to get it...

It started to click during the last third of this DNR.

Don't stop there though.. More DNRTV for Powershell.

"Do you want you know more?".....Hell yes :)

Oh, I'm using powershell. It freaking rocks!!

I'm starting to use PowerShell for my automated build stuff. Being able to use .NET Framework is huge.

I had tried PowerShell on multiple occasions, but it tooks me a while to really get into it until I really had a need for it and until I saw your DNRTV. Today, I made a real good use of PowerShell, that is to call PowerShell script from Ruby. Sending email is so easy from .NET Framework classes under System.Net.Mail, so I knew I could write email sending code easily in PowerShell. But my main scripting for Watir is obviously in Ruby, so I wanted to call the PowerShell script from Ruby. Well, it was really easy... I just did the following.

system('powershell C:\Scripts\MyPowerShellScript.ps1 you can pass args optionally')

The output gets sent to the Ruby console and all is good. Since you can pass arguments to PowerShell scripts and catch them using $args varible, integrating Ruby and PowerShell may be quite an easy job.

Here is what I did.

$logFilePath = $args[0]
$smtp = new-Object System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient("MyEmailServer")

$msg = "Smoke Testing has completed at " + [System.DateTime]::Now.ToString()
$emailMsg = new-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage("from@whatever.com", "to@whatever.com", "Smoke Testing Finished", $msg)
$attachment = new-Object System.Net.Mail.Attachment($logFilePath)
$emailMsg.Attachments.Add($attachment)
$smtp.Send($emailMsg)
Write-Host("Email has been sent")

I have two reasons for not using PowerShell myself.

First, it is firmly bolted to .NET and that's fine in a lot of cases, but I want to post scripts and tips that can be used on any currently-supported Windows platform without requiring .NET. So, for me it is cmd.exe and .bat and if not that, then WSH (not to be confused with WHS), JavaScript, and even that raises issues about script blocking, AV tools, and people who carefully avoid hosted JavaScript on the platform, whether or not in the browser. (I will use accelerator features in products like 4DOS and 4NT, that make operating in a console shell much easier and slicker, but I will confine myself to .bat files for scripts I use and distribute to others.)

Secondly, although I've seen claims that it's based on some established Posix principles and standards, PowerShell is a very weird language from my point of view. It may be a lot of fun and powerful, but somehow it just doesn't get my aesthetic juices flowing. So I haven't found a good reason to go over the learning hump. That's probably my age showing. I've concluded that I must have only one geek chromosome rather than the two that was present in so many guys at last night's nerd dinner (which was a lot of fun, just the same).

Finally, I'm answering your question without listening to the 'cast. I will now remedy that while I prune through unread blog-feed articles that piled up while I was out all day yesterday.

FREAKED ME OUT!!

Oh, ok. Well, I hadn't watched dnrTV before and I didn't realize what would happen. So I hear people talking and oh, there goes the podcast, I think, but why is my browser opening up instead of media player or something and then ... Oh my gosh, they are pushing some windows download to my computer .... !!

OK, you got me. It was the screencast and you were showing Carl the PowerShell download (running as admin all the time too, huh?) but I thought your site had been hacked and I was being social-engineered to click Run! Heh, heh. No kidding.

All right, all right, that's very impressive. I'm impressed with how you used PowerShell and Power Tab.

And I'm even more impressed with that screencast technology. How do I make those? That interests me even more. OK, going to the search panel now ... you must have talked about this somewhere in wayback ...