Part 3. PowerShell for developers

Edited by Oisín Grehan

PowerShell is a scripting language. Scripting is for IT pros. Are these two statements true? Yes, of course, they are—I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. But, I believe that these two truisms are often misinterpreted. This stems from the artificial line drawn between the two major disciplines. That is to say, people assume there is a tangible demarcation between what IT pros and developers do. But, scripting is programming, and programming is scripting. UNIX administrators have always known this. Lord knows, working with SED, AWK, and their ilk is often more like programming than...uh...programming.

If you think PowerShell is not for coders then maybe it’s time you sat back and thought about that. When’s the last time you needed to do a quick calculation? Debug a regular expression? Figure out the correct incantation to format that pesky date string the way the dumb specification says? Opened up your favorite decompiler to try to figure out how that poorly documented third-party library works? Had to toggle a flag in the registry? Needed to generate or modify a fiddly XML document? Had to decode something quickly in Base64 or unravel some triple URL-encoded parameter that is screwing up your web application? Had to test a remote web service? Or address any one of many other one-off or repeating tedious tasks? In all my years coding, I’ve had to do all those things any number of times.