Huddled Masses ← The internet home of Joel “Jaykul” Bennett…

A new way to zip and unzip in PowerShell 3 and .Net 4.5 3

Jun

2013

I’ve got an article coming about WPF 4.5 and what’s new there for ShowUI, but in the meantime I thought I’d share this little nugget I noticed today: System.IO.Compression.FileSystem.ZipFile. You can use that class and it’s buddy ZipArchive to do all sorts of zipping and unzipping tasks. In order to use these new classes, you ...

Long-running background tasks in ShowUI GUIs from PowerShell 1

Jun

2013

A lot of the time when you’re writing ShowUI user interfaces in PowerShell, you’re just asking users for inputs, prompting them for choices, or showing them the results of some calculations (whether that be dashboards, graphics, etc). However, sometimes you need to prompt the user for input and then do some work, and you want ...

Get-Help for Modules you don’t have installed

Feb

2013

If you have you ever wished you could get-help on commands for modules you don’t have installed locally, or are having problems using Save-Help to get module help onto servers that don’t have an internet connection because your clients don’t have those modules — I have a solution. With the new Update-Help command, the PowerShell ...

Why I’m not excited about Windows 8 Certified Store Apps

Dec

2012

It’s come up a few times recently, and I’m frustrated enough that I thought I’d just post this here for reference. The Windows 8 App Certification requirements has one particular requirement that makes me (as a life-long scripter) very unhappy: 3.9 All app logic must originate from, and reside in, your app package Your app ...

PowerShell PowerUser Tips: The Hash TabExpansion

Oct

2012

One of my favorite features in the built-in TabExpansion in PowerShell is one that many (if not most) users are unaware of: the “#” hash mark. In order to test this tip, you’re going to need a command console that you’ve used and typed several commands into, so that Get-History will return more than a ...

Adventures getting MSBuild, TFS and SQL Server Data Tools to work together

Apr

2012

We recently found that our database project at work goes from a 40-minute build and compile to about 20 minutes when we upgrade from the VS2010 (SQL 2008) database projects (with the old .dbproj files) to the new SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) projects with the .sqlproj files, even though we’re still deploying to SQL ...

Get-Command in PowerShell 3 (NOTE: CTP2 Bug causes module loading)

Feb

2012

I don’t normally blog about the bugs I find in beta software, but I posted this bug to PowerShell’s Connect and I feel like it got ignored and not voted, so I’m going to try to explain myself better here … The bug is on Connect, but let me talk to you first about how ...

Rich formatting for PowerShell help

Jan

2012

[updated] Ok, I just updated this with a new post on PoshCode. I posted the HtmlHelp module to PoshCode for generating HTML web pages based on the help for functions or cmdlets. It basically has one command: Get-HtmlHelp, which takes a couple of parameters now. The only mandatory parameter is the name of the command ...

Did you know PowerShell can use Selenium?

Jan

2012

This is sort-of a place-holder for a full-length post that I really ought to write about driving web testing from PowerShell using Selenium. I actually have a little module around for doing that with WaTiN, but honestly the Selenium project seems to be a lot more active, and has quite a bit of muscle behind ...

PowerShell 3 – Finally on the DLR!

Jan

2012

For those of you living in a cave: PowerShell 3 will be released in Windows 8, and we got a CTP at roughly the same time as the Windows 8 Developer Preview was released (at Microsoft’s new //Build/ conference in September 2011). A second CTP was released just in time for Christmas. I’ve been playing ...

About Huddled Masses

This is web site is dedicated to the musings of Joel Bennett (aka Jaykul) about technology, software, software development, the web, and the world.

Any resemblance of the views expressed and the views of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. The resemblance between them and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader.

P.S.: I occasionally link to things I think are great. When I do, I occasionally find a "referral code" so I can make a little cash. I promise that I don't link to anything just because of that cash (I wouldn't cross the street for the amount of cash those links bring in, never mind write a whole blog post) ... but I do not promise that things I link to will stay great as time passes, nor that you will agree with me about their greatness!