If you’re like me and need to do code-reviews of other people’s stuff or maybe you just want to see everything that’s changed during a certain period of a project, then here’s a nice PowerShell tip for you. First, make sure you’ve downloaded the latest version of the Team Foundation Powertools. Starting with the October ‘08 release, the tools now include a PowerShell snap-in that add several commands which enable rich interaction with your Team Foundation Server. Of particular interest to us for this exercise though is the Get-TfsItemHistory command. Now, let’s assume a scenario where we...

Inspired by Craig's MSDNMan, Ian has created an MSDN browser with WPF. If, like me, you read a ton of MSDN content every day, both of these tools are extreeeemely welcome additions to browsing the online content or using the installed version of the content.

Woah, hold the presses! A semi-cool product name coming out of Microsoft? Jason Sacks just announced the next Windows SDK is almost upon us and also let slip this first mention I've seen of a new product name for Monad: Windows PowerShell. Interesting. I immediately searched to see if this was indeed the first time the name was mentioned and AFAICT it is. Although the name “PowerShell” itself has been used numerous times... Update 4/25: Looks like I was ahead of the ball by a little bit last night! It was released today and the name change is official, learn more over on the new PowerShell...

Check out this response from Monad Architect Jeffrey Snover to some constructive criticism from the community. In it he justifies some of the design decisions that were made. He really tries to drive home the point that Monad is primarily a shell language and secondarily a scripting language. He also mentions that there will be a new drop coming “next week” and it will include extended support for auto-completion/intellisense which is something a lot of the community has been clammoring for. Can't wait!

Peter just posted a nice little MSH script for listing out csproj files and their guids. Feeling inspired, here's one I wrote that helps me find all projects that reference another project: get-childitem -Include *.csproj -Recurse | where-object { ([xml](get-content $_)).SelectSingleNode('//*[local-name() = "ProjectReference"]/*[local-name() = "Name" and text() = "<your project name here>"]') -ne $null } | sort-object Name | select-object Name Plop the friendly name of your project into the “<your project name here>” and you can easily find any projects that reference the project you're lookin' for. Note I had to use ugly XPath local-name() hacks to get around the fact that...

Wow, ask and ye shall receive! James Manning has released an initial implentation of an MSH provider for TFSC. Make sure to check out the MSH Community Workspace, where he contributed the source, too! Update: James contacted me to let me know about two things: I had a little typo in the title (“TSFC” instead of “TFSC”) which I've fixed I should probably be calling it TFVC from now on... Team Foundation Version Control vs. Team Foundation Source Control. Thanks James!

Alright, when's there going to be an TFS snap-in for MSH? Sure I can use the .NET classes directly (and am), but I want a TFSC: provider! I want a TFWIT: provider! :)

As you can probably tell by my last post, I spent some time learning MSH (formerly Monad) this weekend and am super pysched to use it as part of my every day problem solving. I picked up the Monad book by O'Reilly and and it was a really great jump start on learning the basics. Most amazing however is, once you learn the basics, everything else really does just come together because of the consistency that is encouraged within the environment. The true power of the environment comes from it's ties to .NET of course since you can manipulate any .NET...

For anyone who's familiar with WATIR, check out this simple MSH script I whipped up: # Create an instance of IE$ie = new-object -ComObject "InternetExplorer.Application"# Navigate to MSN search$ie.Navigate("http://search.msn.com")# Make IE visible$ie.Visible = $true# Grab the DOM document instance$document = $ie.Document# !! See note at end of post !!# Get the query text box and set the search term$document.getElementById("q").innerText = "Drew Marsh"# Click the search button$document.getElementById("srch_btn").click() Now granted this isn't doing the exact same thing as WATIR yet (i.e. it's not really emulating keystrokes to the text box), but basically all one needs to do is create a customized “snap-in” for MSH...