Now this is barely worth blogging, but one of the things I used a lot when I was confined to cmd.exe (yes, "confined" is the word I would use, 4NT aside) is the wonderfully simple copy con filename.txt then type a few lines and end it all with CTRL+Z and enter. So, if you're a PowerShell noob and yearn for this olden-days simplicity like dead parrots pine for the fjords, then this is for you:

I saved this to copy-console.ps1 and aliased it to "cc." Of course, you can do whatever you want - it's probably easier to just put it into a function in your profile. Just place the script above into your profile and remember: CTRL+Z then enter to save.

UPDATE 2008-04-04: Somehow I completely broke this in my attempts to "clean it up" before posting. I've reposted a better version (imho), and implemented encoding support as suggested out in Jason's comment below

PowerShell has several "type accelerators" which are used exactly like a casting operation. Examples of these special operators are [xml] and [wmi]. The former is used for quickly converting a string of xml into a fully-fledged System.Xml.XmlDocument object.

Often I find myself converting things to and from hexadecimal using the -f operator, but this always seemed like just a little too much typing for me. Enter the [hex] accelerator type:

As you can see from the source below, there's no magic here. This is just a straight cast, but I have no namespace. If I had a namespace, say, like "Nivot.PowerShell", we'd have to cast using [nivot.powershell.hex] instead of just [hex]. All of the trickery is done using operator overloads in C#. These tells .NET (and in turn, powershell) how to behave should someone try to add, subtract, remove or divide our instances.

The next step is to tell PowerShell's formatter what to do with the new type. Here's a simple format definition that tells the formatter to call ToString() on the Hex instance. This is the method that does the conversion by calling ToString("X") on the integer field. "X" means format the integer as hexadecimal using upper case. A lower-case "x" would output the value using lower-case (if you couldn't guess ).

If we don't load this format file, PowerShell just emits a couple of blank lines when you try to use it.  You'll notice from the screenshot above that the blank lines still appear. I'm not sure how to remove these - it looks pretty ugly compared to the output of the [int] object. If you want to play with this, you can download the zip file below and unzip the contents into a single folder and run "hex.ps1". I didn't bother with a full Snap-In, it just loads the DLL using reflection. It also loads the format ps1xml too. Have fun.

HexAccelerator1.zip (2.4 KB)

Just a minor thing, but this is a filter I've been using for a while now as a replacement for Get-Member. It's always annoyed me that the Get_ and Set_ methods are returned along with the actual properties. The only place that's actual useful is when you're using an object wrapped in the [xml] adapter since those objects do not expose the XmlDocument's properties in the adapted member set.

update: if you use (of course you do!) MoW's PowerTab, you can disable display of the accessor methods with $PowerTabConfig.ShowAccessorMethods = $false.

Discovered while playing around with the new SPUserToken class and associated goodness that is the new impersonation APIs in WSS 3.0 / SPS 2007. from Reflector:

public static void SetApplicationCendentialKey(SecureString password)
{
    SPCredentialManager.CreateApplicationCendentialKey(password);
}

Ouch! how did that get past QA? there are only five methods on the class - looks like it was a late night for whomever wrote these bits. Unless I'm very much mistaken, shouldn't that read Credential?

microsoft.sharepoint.spsecurity.setapplicationcendentialkey

Someone on the PowerShell usenet group asked if it was possible to interact with SharePoint lists through our favourite little shell. Marco Shaw responded and put the pressure on by saying this was my bag of tricks. Who am I to say otherwise? so lets take a look at the recipe.

My last post got me thinking about the problems experienced when trying to write culture aware software. Yeah, I know it was actually me that was unaware of the culture, but this time it's about the software end of the deal; in particular, the recently updated Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor for Microsoft's popular SharePoint 2007 server. If you read some of the comments on the blog, you'll see that various people (using a non US English version of Windows) have installed it and have come across a problem where the tool cannot find the local security group called "Builtin\Users." Oops. In the world of cutting-edge technology, people often install software that doesn't match the installed language of their O/S. The fact of the world is that all major symbolic computer languages are based around English, and the most popular software gets written in English first. Here in Quebec, Canada, French is the primary language with English coming second (Canada is officially bilingual - although most of the country only speaks English). Localization of software takes a fair amount of time. It's not just translating a resources file - there are hot-keys to reassign (the Bold shotcut in French MSWord is CTRL+G for example, bold being Gras in French) dialog boxes to resize, labels and controls to reposition etc. Some languages are more verbose than others and end up with text that won't fit. However, there are things you do to avoid certain problems -- lets take the issue above as an example.

Logins and Group names are just an abstraction in the Windows security subsystem. These things are actually represented by value called a SID ( system.security.principal.securityidentifier ). No matter what version of Windows you use, the SIDs for built-in accounts and groups are the same:

First using an en-US system:

and a French (fr-FR) system:

As you can see, the SID is the same: S-1-5-32-545. An example of this is shown below - a simple If-Elevated function that takes two Scriptblocks: the first is executed if the user is running as an administrator, the second is running if the user is just a plain well, user:

So ok, it doesn't have localized messages, but at least it will execute correctly on other locales Have fun.

Some weeks ago, I started a new contract for a pretty monstrous MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 project. The thing is, this is my first pure Francophone environment since I first came to Canada four years ago. As the agency is part of the Canadian Government -- and located in Quebec -- most of the software installed is the French version. The keyboards are fr-ca, Windows is French, and yep, SharePoint is installed in French. It's proving quite difficult to find my way around as the translations are not really comparable. Sometimes they are not even close. It's worse though, because a lot of the idioms are France-French, not Quebec-French. As Quebecers (and confused French people) will tell you, it can be quite a different language sometimes.

Today, it got a lot worse.

I found myself having to define a calculated column - that is to say, a cell in a list that performs calculations based on other cells in the row. You've got the usual SUM, AVG etc functions available. Only except this time I don't. After several frustration attempts, I discovered that the scripting language itself has been translated into French. At first my reaction was incredulity - what is the point of that? They don't translate C# for other cultures, so why do that? Surely this kind of functionality is aimed at power users, like Excel users! they don't translate the Excel formulas in other locales of Office?!

Except they do.

Merde.

I'm happy to say that the powers that be in Microsoft have deemed me MVP worthy - I am now an official Microsoft Most Valued Professional in Windows Server Admin Frameworks for 2008, more specifically for my open source work and public support of Microsoft's most excellent object-oriented interactive shell, PowerShell during the last 18 months.

I've just returned from an extended computational absence, so hopefully I can get back to churning out code and the odd blog post.