May 2007 - Software Development

Powershell one liner to see the progress of an install

So I am installing the Visual Studio 2005 SP1, which takes up to several hours according to one of the early installer screens. I have had to install VS 2005 SP1 on several machines, and it has been known to become unresponsive during the install, requiring...

Published Thu, May 05 2007 6:46 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Team Explorer

I have been doing a bit of reasearch on Team Explorer. In the early beta vesions of VS.Net 2005, they iincluded Team Explorer in the VS 2005 install. When it became apparent that Team Foundation Server (TFS) was not going to be ready for release by the...

Published Thu, May 05 2007 1:31 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Quick and easy way to measure the length of a string

If you want to quickly measure the length of a string, you can use Powershell. Just enclose the string in quotes and call the Length property. For example: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog".length "C:\Documents and Settings...

Published Thu, May 05 2007 10:59 AM by David

Filed under: powershell

Count the number of properties, methods, events, etc on all types in all assemblies loaded into Powershell

While writing my earlier blogs on loading assemblies and finding types, I was playing around with the functions that allow me to count the total available members on all types in all loaded assembles. This may not be of great use, but it is interesting...

Published Wed, May 05 2007 9:20 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Find paths longer than a given number of characters

There are times where you may need to list the paths to files and folders which exceed a given number of characters. FAT, NTFS, CDFS, ISO DVD, FATX, and Novell Netware all have different limitations on the length of a path. It is helpful to know the paths...

Published Wed, May 05 2007 8:38 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Powershell function to locate a type

My earlier posts on loading assemblies into Powershell gave me an idea for a useful Powershell function. I cannot remember the namespace for every type in the .Net framework, and all of our own custom business types. I have always wanted to have the functionality...

Published Tue, May 05 2007 11:17 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Load an assembly in Powershell Pt 2

Yesterday I posted on adding an assembly to Powershell. You should be aware that if you load an assembly from the command line, it will only be loaded during that session. If you exit the command line, and run the Powershell command line again, you will...

Published Tue, May 05 2007 9:58 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Get-Member is your friend

One of the best cmdlets you can use while learning Powershell is Get-Member . This cmdlet will show all available methods and properties on any given type. If you execute the following command: "Hello" | Get-Member it will show the following...

Published Mon, May 05 2007 11:45 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

What version of .Net is Powershell using?

Here is a quick and easy way to find out what version of .Net Powershell is using. [Reflection.Assembly]::GetAssembly([String]) It uses the GetAssembly static method, passing in the .Net base class type of String.

Published Mon, May 05 2007 11:34 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Load an assembly in Powershell Pt 1

By default, Powershell loads a bunch of assemblies for you so that you can start working with the base types, and some common functions. If you want to use the functionality in an assembly that is not already loaded, you will have to load that assembly...

Published Mon, May 05 2007 10:01 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Powershell Setup

As you can tell, I am a big fan of Powershell. In this post, I will document my Powershell setup. This is mainly for my own notes, but if you can get something out of this, then well and good. I would expect this to change fairly rapidly, so I will be...

Published Sun, May 05 2007 8:03 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Desktop Search - A must-have productivity tool

One of the best productivity tools I use is a desktop search. I have tries various incarnations of desktop search application including "Copernic", "Google Desktop Search", "X1", "Yahoo Desktop Search", and several...

Published Fri, May 05 2007 10:09 PM by David

Filed under: search

Regular expressions in Powershell

Here is a simple example of using Regular Expressions (Regex) in Powershell. It will find any string starting with "http://" and ending with ".com" # Set up the pattern to look for. This is a non-greedy search for http links in the...

Published Thu, May 05 2007 10:35 PM by David

Filed under: powershell, regex

Get HTML using Powershell

The following powershell command uses the .Net library to download a HTML page from the web and displays it in the console. (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString("http://www.eggins.com") You must include the protocol "http://"...

Published Thu, May 05 2007 10:28 PM by David

Filed under: powershell

Powershell Date Formatting

There are many date formatting options available to Powershell using the .net format specifiers. I will show some examples below, and you can look to the end of this post to see alla vailable format specifiers. To format a date to long date: "{0...

Published Thu, May 05 2007 6:44 PM by David

Filed under: powershell, dotnet, formatting

Powershell Number Formatting

The number formatting features available to Powershell though the dot net String.Format() function are a lot more exciting than the string formatting mentioned in my last post. I will give some examples here, and you may look at the end of this post for...

Published Thu, May 05 2007 6:04 PM by David

Filed under: powershell, dotnet, formatting

Powershell String Formatting

Powershell uses the .Net string formatting features in String.Format. The only formatting functionality for a string is the alignment. To left align a string and pad to 40 chars, the following two lines produce the same result: [System.String]::Format...

Published Thu, May 05 2007 5:28 PM by David

Filed under: powershell, dotnet, formatting

IIS SMTP Settings

You can set up your application to send emails using the System.Web.Mail.SmtpMail class. You must supply the name or IP address of your SMTP mail server or relay using the SmtpServer property: SmtpMail.SmtpServer = "MyMailServer" If you want...

Published Thu, May 05 2007 2:54 PM by David

Filed under: iis, smtp

A good collection of Powershell scripts for TFS

This is a good collection of Powershell scripts for Team Fountation Server. http://blogs.msdn.com/jmanning/pages/various-powershell-scripts.aspx

Published Fri, May 05 2007 2:01 PM by David

Filed under: powershell, tfs

May 2007 - Software Development

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Powershell one liner to see the progress of an install

Team Explorer

Quick and easy way to measure the length of a string

Count the number of properties, methods, events, etc on all types in all assemblies loaded into Powershell

Find paths longer than a given number of characters

Powershell function to locate a type

Load an assembly in Powershell Pt 2

Get-Member is your friend

What version of .Net is Powershell using?

Load an assembly in Powershell Pt 1

Powershell Setup

Desktop Search - A must-have productivity tool

Regular expressions in Powershell

Get HTML using Powershell

Powershell Date Formatting

Powershell Number Formatting

Powershell String Formatting

IIS SMTP Settings

A good collection of Powershell scripts for TFS