fredag den 16. august 2013

PowerShell detour

The "MCSA: SQL Server 2012" certification has been temporarily paused, while I investigate some tools that could prove useful. 
 
I am looking into Team Foundation Server - especially the parts of Continuous Integration and Deployment. First step in that direction was learning Powershell scripting, which looks as a great way of doing automated deployments on Windows and now I just finished reading the book "Windows Powershell 3.0 First Steps":
 

Having experience with both .NET and scripting in general (mostly Bash/Unix-style scripting) learning the basics of Powershell was not hard. Of course, there are hundreds of commands (called cmdlets) that it will take time to get really comfortable with, but the fundamentals of Powershell seems easy enough.

One very nice thing about Powershell is the discoverability of commands and parameters. Tab-completion is very Visual Studio-like and is way more advanced than the traditional path-expansions in other shells. The help system also appears quite polished, but perhaps the part I like best, is the focus on (typed) objects.

The pipeline plays just as important a role as it does in Unix-scripting, but instead of piping text lines, it pipes typed objects. This allows very easy access to rich information about files, processes etc. without all the "awk"-text parsing. Easier, more robust and probably faster too.

Powershell also includes quite powerful remoting capabilities, perhaps finally bringing practical SSH'ish functionality to Windows. It appears pretty easy to use, but it requires one to have Active Directory configured right. It can also run on HTTPS.

So, a question begs to be asked: is a mono-based powershell for Linux a desireable thing? Does it exists?

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