Episode 56 – James Kovacs talks about PSake

A Podcast about Windows PowerShell.

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In This Episode

Tonight on the PowerScripting Podcast we talk to developer James Kovacs about his PowerShell build tool, psake.

News

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• Cool post from the PowerShell team talking about the new Remote Desktop Services provider in 2008 R2
• The Group Policy Health cmdlet is now free!
• PSVIC is a new project on Google Code. Aims to be a replacement for VMware’s VI Console, but done with PowerShell.
• PowerShell Virtual User Group meeting Jan 29th at noon EST

Interview

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James  Kovacs , B.Sc., M.Sc., MCSD, MCT

Primary Profile: James Kovacs is an independent architect, developer, trainer, and jack-of-all-trades specializing in agile development using the .NET Framework. He is passionate about helping developers create flexible software using test-driven development (TDD), unit testing, object-relational mapping, dependency injection, refactoring, continuous integration, and related techniques. He assists clients in building smart clients, web applications, web services, and even full-fledged servers using the .NET Framework and Microsoft server technologies. You can listen to him and his fellow plumbers, John and Bil on their podcast, Plumbers at Work – http://www.plumbersatwork.com – which is syndicated by MSDN Canada Community Radio. He is a frequent speaker at user groups and events. He published an article on memory leaks in managed code in MSDN Magazine (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/01/ManagedLeaks/default.aspx). James is a Microsoft MVP – Solutions Architect and card-carrying member of ALT.NET – a group of software professionals continually looking for more effective ways to develop applications.. He holds a variety of designations, including MCP, MCAD, MCSD, and MCT. He received his Bachelors degree from the University of Toronto and his Masters degree from Harvard University.

• stevenmurawski: ##how does psake differ from tools like Nant and MSBuild?
• stevenmurawski: ##Do you think there is an advantage to using psake over Nant and MSBuild?
• stevenmurawski: ##MSBuild and Nant have a number of tasks (included and community provided), is there a task library for psake under development, or do we have to start from scratch?
• stevenmurawski: ##if you are calling MSBuild from psake, aren’t you adding a layer of complexity to your build process?
• ebgreen: ##So something like a DSL for builds?
• ## what in your background makes you concerned with the pains of deploying apps in the enterprise?

Resources

Admin Script Editor (which recently received Windows IT Pro’s top award) provides a true integrated scripting environment for PowerShell.  Advanced features include an integrated PowerShell debugger, advanced code generating tools for Active Directory, Databases, XML files and more.  Let’s not forget about the exclusive PowerShell forms designer.  Come see for yourself– Admin Script Editor v3.5 is availble for a 45 day trial at AdminScriptEditor.com.

• Exclusive tip from Bruce Payette: Out-Default wrapper / URL launcher
• Two part tutorial on the switch statement
• Introduction to the new Group Policy cmdlets in Windows 7 – creating a new GPO
• Antoine H, the author of PoshBoard and blogger at devinfra-us, has put up a getting started guide for PoshBoard.
• /\/\o\/\/ did a blog post a while back about a couple of TechNet webcasts about PowerShell
• Don Jones talks about developing an inventory tool in PowerShell in the February issue of Technet Magazine

Tips

• Lee Holmes has put up a tutorial for using P/Invokes in PowerShell

Gotcha

• This one pops on the forums about once a week…
  Get-Content stripping off the line breaks on a text file as it serializes the content into an array of strings…. Anyways you get the idea examples:
  http://powershellcommunity.org/Forums/tabid/54/aff/1/afv/topic/aft/3514/Default.aspx
  http://powershellcommunity.org/Forums/tabid/54/aff/1/aft/3599/afv/topic/afpgj/1/Default.aspx#4061
  Will normally bite you when trying to format something for an external applications, or when parsing logs.
  work-around is usually either a here-string or adding the line breaks back in.
  ~Glenn