Happy New Year

Just over half a day left of 2006 here in London, the weather is cold, windy and wet, the coffee is on, and I write my first post!

I’ve been using PowerShell (abbreviated to PS1 from now on) since it was RTW (released to web) some time at the end of November 2006. A few of my colleagues also starting playing with it, and as some of us were unix/Mac people, we set about mocking it :-).

Speaking for myself, I was quite impressed but less so with the documentation and other online resources. I’ve also become less and less impressed with it over the last several weeks, but then it’s quite common for the shine to wear off new toys.

First Impressions

A pipeline - yay!
Scripting .NET and COM
Looks like it might have closures and rubyesque features.

Second Impressions

It didn’t have have closures after all.
Very very slow
snip

Space Invaders

Anyway, this didn’t stop me trying to do inappropriate and silly things with it. e.g., getting the MS Agent (Merlin etc.) to insult you.

It’s always been a pet hobby of mine to try to write Space Invaders in any new language I learn. Usually it just goes as far as writing something that moves the alien hoard in an authentic way, as you don’t really get input event support in languages like COBOL or CMD.EXE batch language.

Joy! PS1 gives you access to the host console via $host.ui.rawui, so the work began.

Between myself and 3 colleagues, we did get a perfectly playable version of Space Invaders, and I plan to put it up here in a future post.

That’s it for now. Happy PS1 scripting in 2007!