Worst product name (for developers)

Published on 07 February 2007 • Estimated reading time: 1 minutes

Microsoft PowerShell may be the worst product name for developers. If you write scripts, I’m not classing you as a developer—I’m classing people who understand Assemblies, Namespaces, and Generics as developers for this post. Anyway, if you are a developer, it should be called .NET Object to Text Render (and if Motorola made it, NOTR), since that is what it actually does: it converts .NET objects to text. Once you understand that concept, it gets a lot more powerful than the whole "DIR", "COPY" on a blue background than it appears the first time.

So it understands strings, so this is possible:

PS C:\Documents and Settings\rmaclean> 'sadev'+'.co.za'
sadev.co.za

It also understands ints, so this is also possible:

PS C:\Documents and Settings\rmaclean> 67 * 34 + 9 - 22
2064

And since .NET understands how to translate ints to strings, this becomes possible:

PS C:\Documents and Settings\rmaclean> 'sadev'+'.co.za' + (67 * 34 + 9 - 223) + 999
sadev.co.za2064999

And since objects can have properties, you can start with Get-ChildItem (which is like _DIR_ for the old school in the audience), then add:

| where-object { $_.CreationTime -gt "1/29/2007" }

to get all items created since Jan 29, 2007. Example:

Get-ChildItem | where-object { $_.CreationTime -gt "1/29/2007" }

Then add on | Export-Csv to export the results to a CSV file. Pure madness—I say, pure developer insanity! :D