When PowerShell hash table magic backfires

submitted by Klaus 2 days, 23 hours ago

tellingmachine.com — We just made it through the holidays and I finally found time to write about the most annoying thing in PowerShell: Hash table semi-automatic, which can easily result in some subtle bugs. And all of that, just because the hash tables don't behave as I would expect. I assumed hash tables to be implicitly sorted by the keys using the Sort-Object cmdlet and to always stay hash tables and not get converted into arrays of Dictionary Entries or even a single Dictionary entry when piped into a Where-Object cmdlet. To workaround these strange defects you need to apply some unnatural constructs and roll your own select statements. It just doesn't feel fair to make your children call GetEnumerator() before they try to find today's window on their Advents Calendar. read more...

add a comment | category: Tips & Tricks | Views: 5

One PowerShell Script to download PDC2008 Videos, Code and PowerPoints

published 28 days, 12 hours ago, submitted by Klaus 28 days, 15 hours ago

tellingmachine.com — Yes I did it. I downloaded all 65,563,667,714 bytes and saved them as 407 files on my nice new WD Passport hard drive that I brought home from the PDC2008. And, yes I did it the old fashioned manual way: Right-Click on link and Save-As. But you don't have to do it. In this blog post I provide the metadata of all the files I downloaded and a PowerShell script that will help you automating the download process. Besides the PDC content you also get to a treasure trove of PowerShell scripting techniques ranging from dynamically generating Regular Expressions to loading meta-data form XML and CSV files. read more...

add a comment | category: Regular Expressions | Views: 214

Set-Content -Encoding parameter matters, if the content says so...

submitted by Klaus 1 month, 28 days ago

tellingmachine.com — I use a simple PowerShell script to replace some of the URLs in my blog post's html source before I publish them to www.tellingmachine.com. In my case the posts are stored as XML files. Usually I use Windows Live Writer to write my posts. I publish the documents for test purposes frequently during the authoring to the VisualStudio 2008 development web server that runs locally on my machine. Once the post is ready to put online, I take the XML file, run the PowerShell script against it and then copy it to my production server. Occasionally the XML files refuse to open in Internet Explorer after I ran the script. It took me few minutes to figure out why. Here is the story! read more...

add a comment | category: Tips & Tricks | Views: 8

Patching File System Trees with PowerShell

submitted by Klaus 4 months, 9 days ago

tellingmachine.com — While working on a elaborate PowerShell script I needed to find a solution for the following problem: I wanted to do a string replace operation on a file system path name and have the resulting new string be reflected by the file system. For example the path name "C:\dogs\dog food\my favorites\hot dogs\Who let the dogs out.mp3" should be renamed by replacing "dog" with "cat". The resulting path name would be "C:\cats\cat food\my favorites\hot cats\Who let the cats out.mp3". Sounds easy, but how do I move the folders and files that are referred to in the path to their new locations? And even better, how can I do this recursively? This short blog post demonstrates two possible approaches. read more...

add a comment | category: Tips & Tricks | Views: 1

Finding missing and duplicate lines in text files using PowerShell

submitted by Klaus 5 months, 13 days ago

tellingmachine.com — Every now and then I need to investigate bugs that get exposed because countable "things" are less or more than expected. In my special case I was dealing with an application that manages subscription handles to memory registers of programmable logic controllers (PLC). These programs are called Data Access Servers. Occasionally we get calls form customers reporting that the number of handles is less, or sometimes more than expected. The first step to debug this situation is to find out, which handles are missing or which ones are duplicates. This blog post describes how PowerShell's Compare-Object cmdlet makes this task, which used to be a pain in the "peep" now a piece of cake. read more...

add a comment | category: Tips & Tricks | Views: 4

Renaming a series of indexed files with Powershell

submitted by Klaus 5 months, 21 days ago

tellingmachine.com — I love Powershell. I am only halfway through Bruce's book, but I am getting already a glimpse of its potential. I like especially the dynamic aspect of it. Creating and extending types on the fly is something that is quite exciting. Next I am looking to find a solution for my open issues with sorting hash tables. I think building a custom PSObject type with an integer NoteProperty and a NoteProperty that holds a FileInfo object might get me a few steps closer to solving the sorting challenge. read more...

add a comment | category: Tips & Tricks | Views: 4

How to rename batches of files using .NET Regular Expressions

submitted by Klaus 6 months, 28 days ago

tellingmachine.com — The tool that I am presenting here renames batches of files that have some kind of numerical index as part of their file name. It can rename the text before the index, it can shift the index numbers, give the files a new extension and add or remove leading zeros to and from the numerical index part of the file name. It uses Regular Extensions to parse the file names. read more...

add a comment | category: Windows Forms | Views: 23

How does IPv6 impact web debugging with VS200(58)?

submitted by Klaus 8 months, 17 days ago

tellingmachine.com — IPv6 might break the connection between IE 7 to the local instance of the Visual Studio development web server "webdev.webserver.exe". read more...

add a comment | category: Visual Studio | Views: 0