Hello PowerShell!

I’ve always had a soft spot for scripting. I know there is this stigma attached to shell and command scripting that reeks of ‘fake programming’ but honestly, I think ‘real’ programmer types can appreciate the benefits of being able to automate just about anything with a few relatively simple key strokes. I was on the VBScript/WSH bandwagon pretty hard, and I made extensive use of it for my companies Altiris deployment. As a result, I have a great deal of experience with it. Lately, I’ve been taken from scripting into the somewhat magical realm of .NET coding, which had been a totally separate area of study. Enter PowerShell: A .NET based interpreted script language for windows. That “interpreted” part I think is what makes people feel so ‘dirty’ when they talk about scripts, but come on, if you’re a .NET coder (or even a Java Programmer), you’re used to feeling that little bit dirty every time you run a ‘compiled’ executable on the runtime! After all, isn’t a virtual machine a sort of glorified interpreter anyway? (Yes, I realize there are technical differences, but, conceptually they are the same.) I take this approach to it: if you can point click and type something and you do it more than twice, then you might as well script it. I’ve just been playing with powershell for now, but the new playing field it opens up for me will allow me to come to grips with the fact that I’m a programmer trapped in the career of a systems administrator. I’ll play around and post some interesting things if I can come up with them. In the meanitme, here’s the site where you CAN AND WILL IMMEDIATELY GO AND GET POWERSHELL. Make sure you check out this PowerShell Blog and get the SDK too!

Something that bothers me a little

.Net remoting is officially discouraged now, right? So, we’re all supposed to just quit that and go to web services because they are the standard. Who cares about ‘performance’ and ‘TCP channels’, because we’re trying to write services that inter-operate with the world… So, why does Microsoft still use TCP/proprietary remoting to connect to SQL Server? This surely should be the ONE place they’d like to make a good example for everyone to follow… right? Huh. Well, I don’t like it. I’m calling foobar on them. I’d be willing to bet my lunch money that the reason they haven’t switched is for performance, and to FORCE platform dependence. What if I just want that performance? What if I WANT people to have to use my client to talk to my server? Is that possible?

Hi DevX readers!

If any of you wound up here from DevX please do let me know what you think. I apologize up front for the silly captcha thing on the comment box, but I was getting so much spam, and moderation was not coming in moderation… if you know what I mean. So, please try not to be turned off by that.. If you didn’t like it, please give me a heads up, a smack in the head, or whatever.

Vista: Thinking of you

So, Windows Vista is in RTM. I’ve been sort-of working on it now for a little over a week. I’m starting to get a feel for what it’s about.. and some of it I don’t like.

When you are learning to drive a car in a new place, you have to be very careful, and go a little slower. You confuse some small roads with others, and you don’t have the locations of the traffic signals memorized, so you read them each time you pass, carefully analyzing the messages, like ‘Stop!’ and ‘No Parking!’

After a while though, you get used to the surroundings, and you instinctively slow down and coast to a stop without even noticing the stop sign. You know where the crosswalks are that you have to pause and let the pedestrians walk across, all the while giving you dirty looks, like ‘What? You’re driving? Can’t you see I’m WALKING here? You WILL wait for me to cross, and so I’ll walk slow to prove how smug I am…’ Anyway… you start to know where you need to do what, without having to be constantly reminded.

Well, in Vista, unless you hack around a little, you never get that chance. You will always have the stop sign blinding your view of anything else, and you’re forced to interrupt whatever you might be thinking about to click ‘OK, yes I’m an admin.’

Sure the average consumer might need a little cajoling to not install that malicious software, but that really shouldn’t mean that I need to approve any and every attempt to change my clock settings. Not to mention that if I’ve approved the installation of a particular piece of software, I shouldn’t have to also click ‘yes’ on every HKLM registry entry it tries to write. Granted, I know that microsoft is trying to force the hands of the developers, but what about the critical adoption period? I already know a lot of people, especially developers, who run visual studio 2003 who are crying FOUL for other reasons — VS.Net 2003 does NOT run on vista unless you turn off User Account Control (UAC). Period. Doesn’t.

I know they sort of mean well, but taking such a hard line to consumers who are dumb enough to need that sort of smack you in the face lockdown is really going to alienate the base… Users who only use windows because they think it’s easier than learning something else. When you have to approve ten popups, and open new windows, (and think ‘What is a Zone anyway, isn’t it all Internet?’) before you can check your normal old ssl protected web-based email, you may not be so keen on the easy factor.

I don’t claim to know how to fix the problem, but I do know that this probably isn’t it. I expect there to be a rash of ‘utilities’ on CNET that will let you ‘turn off the annoying vista features.’ Not unlike popup-blockers are today.

So ultimately, we have a platform that is technically superior, and configured by default to be more secure, but at times is downright unusable to anyone but a relative expert… I don’t know. Sounds like Linux.

Edit: after thinking about that a while I’ve decided that if I have to run a more secure OS, and I can’t run my precious Visual Studio (even 2k5 doesn’t work — yet — with AUC on full blast, but they’re fixing that,) it might as well BE linux, and I think I’d like that better anyway. In fact, I run a redhat box that only prompts you for admin creds when you do a very few certain things. Now THAT is the right idea.

Testing a hypothesis

Just how fast does a blog-o-meme spread? Find out for yourself! It’s all in the name of not-so-hard science.