Archive for the ‘.NET’ Category

PowerShell for Developers: Slides for my TechDays 2010 Finland presentation

If you’re after my slides for my TechDays 2010 presentation earlier today (“PowerShell kehittäjille”, a.k.a. PowerShell for Developers), look no further. Unfortunately, the material is in Finnish only.
You can find the slides and one of the demo scripts in a single zip package. Also, if you want the WebNote demo, the solution is available in [...]

March 9, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: .NET  No Comments

"Denali" to finally ship Oslo?

So, SQL Server vNext finally has a name. It’s Denali, and that’s a mountain in Alaska. But will Oslo finally be there?
PDC 2009 revealed us something about Oslo: It’s far less than it once was, and perhaps that’s exactly the way to mature a product from a visionary cloud to a usable state. It’s now [...]

February 15, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: .NET  One Comment

PowerShell Basics #4: Matching and capturing with regular expressions

Using regular expressions on Windows hasn’t been particularly easy, as the standard command-line tools have provided very little support to these powerful beasts. On the other hand, various spawns of Unix have had loads of support for regexes on the command line, including classic tools such as grep, sed and awk.
PowerShell changes things here. It [...]

February 13, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: .NET  No Comments

Check out SharePoint Blues!

A brief advertisement: The SharePoint Team in our company (Sininen Meteoriitti) has started their own blog, SharePoint Blues.
Go check it out! These guys already have a batch of posts, ranging from topics like breadcrumb navigation all the way to an installation pitfall checklist. And more is coming… So if you’re into SharePoint, take a look. [...]

February 10, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: .NET  No Comments

PowerShell Basics #3: Manipulating data in text files

To continue my series of PowerShell Basics posts, I’ll cover some basic features around manipulating text file data.
First off, the problem is really two separate problems: Handling text file IO and manipulating the contents. PowerShell provides decent tools for both, and since everything is just .NET objects, you can run any .NET string manipulations you [...]

February 5, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: .NET  No Comments

PowerShell Basics #2: Dir for power users

You would think the standard dir command in cmd.exe would do its job adequately, but it’s still surprising how much more functionality can you pack into it. Here’s an introduction to power-using Get-ChildItem, also known by the aliases of dir and ls.

Leveraging FileInfo and DirectoryInfo
For starters, it is important to remember that dir returns objects. [...]

January 28, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: .NET, Windows IT  No Comments

PowerShell Basics #1: Reading and parsing CSV

I will be giving a talk on the topic of “PowerShell for Developers” at TechDays 2010 in Helsinki, Finland. As a warm-up to my presentation, I will be publishing a series of blog posts on various aspects of PowerShell. My viewpoint is specifically one of developer utility: What can PowerShell do to make a dev’s [...]

January 22, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: .NET  No Comments

Creating custom types in PowerShell, revisited for v2

In June, I blogged on creating custom types within PowerShell. In PowerShell v2, released with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, things are a bit easier.
Now, the syntax for adding properties is far nicer, as you can pass a hashtable of values to add-member. Namely, the previous example of enumerating the applications run at [...]

January 20, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: .NET  3 Comments

UTF-8 preamble is a problem when you concatenate files

You’re just changing a couple of words in an XML file with Notepad. Your data modifications are guaranteed to be valid by schema. That couldn’t possibly break anything, could it?
<insert the ugly buzzer sound>
It quite likely couldn’t, unless you were editing an XML file that happened to be using UTF-8. Because while Notepad certainly looks [...]

December 21, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: .NET, Misc. programming  4 Comments

Visual Studio 2010 delayed – but it’s not a bad thing

Yesterday, Soma announced that Visual Studio 2010 would be delayed for a few weeks (apparently from the original 22nd March 2010 launch date). But really, we should all be happy – we’re getting a February Release Candidate in return.
If you’ve followed the VS2010 lifecycle, you’ll already guess it’s the performance. If you’re interested and are [...]

December 18, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: .NET  No Comments