Soo… PowerShell seriously rocks! I just downloaded the 1.0 release for Vista today and was playing around with it. Here’re my top 2 features in the couple of hours that I’ve been playing with it…
Cool feature #1: You have the entire .net framework at your disposal from the command line. So, you can instantiate any .net class and call methods on it with no compiler or anything.
Cool feature #2: It natively understands xml. Which means that you can get an xml blob and play around with it at the command line.
Combine the two together and what do you get?
A shell script that prints out the latest woot.com sale item and price:
PS C:Usersumeshu> ([xml] (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(“http://www.woot.com/Blog/Rss.aspx”)).rss.channel.item[0].title
Philips GoGear 2GB MP3 Player w/ FM Tuner – $49.99
Or how about the latest headlines from Slashdot:
PS C:Usersumeshu> ([xml] (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(“http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot”)).RDF.Item| select title
Brain Scanner Can Read People’s Intentions
Is Interoperable DRM Really Less Secure?
MIT’s Millimeter Turbine to be Ready This Year
Microsoft Not Dropping Hotmail Name
Mice Cured of Autism
Cisco to Open Source CTA
Windows Expert Jumps Ship
University Professor Chastised For Using Tor
FAA To Free Aircraft Hobbled By IP Laws
Apple’s Windows Apps Not Ready For Vista
Yahoo Pipes
Canonical and Linspire Make a Deal
Indonesia Stops Sharing Avian Virus Samples
Did Gates Fib About H1-B Salaries?
To Media Companies, BitTorrent Implies Guilt
Neat, huh 🙂 More to follow in the weeks ahead I suppose…
PS: Holy @!%*&, it’s been over two months since I last blogged! There’s been too much happening in life and work over the past few months that’s kept me busy, but I hope to blog more frequently in the New Year.