It’s getting harder to post useful scripting tips for PowerShell these days as there are so many talented hardcore scripting bloggers around. My day to day is job is not system/network/server administrator; I’m a .NET developer, having started the C# habit about eight or nine years ago with the early CLR 1.0 beta. So, from here on in, I’ve decided that a better direction for me to take from now on is that of a PowerShell developer,  as opposed to a scripter. There are very few (if any?) dedicated PowerShell developer blogs around, and so I figured I should try to fill that gap as best I can. I have a not insignificant amount of experience writing providers, cmdlets and other widgety bits, so it’s a good time to share my experiences. Of course, my way is not “the” way, so please reply with your own experiences/advice/mocking/whatever.

That said, I am not eschewing scripting altogether – I have some stuff in the pipeline (har-har) concerning areas I’m interested in, like eventing and jobs/remoting.

In the latest PowerShellCX changeset, archive read and extract support is finally available. Sorry there are no binary builds yet. Use the Extract-Archive cmdlet as a stand-alone to extract all files. Use Read-Archive to generate ArchiveEntry objects which can be piped through Where-Object for filtering and eventual consumption by Extract-Archive (which can accept ArchiveEntry as well as FileInfo pipeline input). I’ve got progress reporting working too for extract. I’ve added support for reading/extracting SevenZip, Arj, BZip2, Cab, Chm, Cpio, Deb, GZip, Iso, Lzh, Lzma, Nsis, Rar, Rpm, Tar, Wim, Z & Zip.  Yes, you did see ISO support in that list Write support is only zip, bzip2, tar and gzip still.

There are more features coming, including encrypted archive support.

In case anyone is interested, here are my slides in PowerPoint PPTX format from the most recent PS Virtual User Group. It covers the new Path handling infrastructure for PscxCmdlets in the upcoming PowerShell Community Extensions 1.2 and some brief information on my PowerShell Eventing snap-in for PowerShell.

psvug2_oisin_grehan.zip (152 KB)

(updated to a zip: it appears DasBlog will not serve pptx files?)

Well, we've done it! Head on over to grab the latest release of PowerShell's most advanced and feature-rich snap-in!

http://www.codeplex.com/PowerShellCX

I'm pretty proud of this one. I wrote the archive cmdlets write-zip, write-bzip2, write-tar and write-gzip. I also wrote a general purpose assembly resolver cmdlet, resolve-assembly, and also an AssemblyCache provider; yes, the GAC.