(sigh) I guess I have to find some other oaf with the mind of a child with a brain injury to bat around, much like a cat toying with the mouse it will rip apart later on.

James,

I love you. Passionately. You don't know how I cried the day I read the post you deleted. To say that I was hurting inside would be an understatement.

Please come back, James. I'm a lost man without you. Come back to me and I'll make it all better.

Your (hopefully more than) friend,
Terry Tarle

So anyway, moving on:

Windows Command Prompt is the shizznit, yo! Forget Powershell, go back to DOS 6 with Windows Command Prompt!

It even has the up arrow key to remember your last commands.

Still doesn't do tab-completion but hey, we can't all be BASH, now, can we?

el cliff,

you ask for some oaf with the mind of a child, I present to you... the bash user. It's an interesting etymology, the system was named after how the user's repeatedly bashed their head against the wall crying "why oh why can't I have powershell?! Why can't my pipelines be object-based instead of 1960s-based-strings"

hahaha! just playin' about liam. I applaud your troll-i-ness :) In truth, I can respect the bash user (while secretly laughing at them for all the string parsing they're forced to do.. *shudder* I hate string parsing)

I've never had a problem with string parsing. In fact, most of the programs i made before coming to intuit were based on, based on improving, or made extensive use of string parsing.

Yeah, okay, you're probably right.

So, working in .NET 3.0 yet? Does Powershell support .NET 3.0?

My argument, a slight bit more clearly, against string parsing is thus: it's error prone. String parsing is certainly a fact of life for any developer that's been in the game for a while (some devs run up against it day one, others get to go years without dealing with the hassle, but eventually, all devs that are in it for the long term...). And it's not that you can't do string parsing effectively, and to great benefit. It's just that typically, string parsing is a way of coping with the fact that some other process (whether command line output, a external system dump, a standardized codified protocol) has somehow translated their intricate rich data model into a bunch of lowest common denominator, readable-by-all, list of strings, typically terminated by a line-feed.

It's a very rich, powerful, expressive format that is very resistant to the various incarnations and reincarnations of systems, as each programming, shell, etc, environment feels the need to re-invent everyone else's wheel (powershell and .net being NO exception). But you get stuck with the fact that someone decided that SubString(23, 72) is a date-encoding in the form "YYYY-DD-MMMMMMM HH:mmmmmm:sss:mmmmm a/p YYYYYYYY-DDDDD-mmm +/-timezone [+/-timezone offset]" where YYYYYYYY is some quirk of the outputing system where you will spend 14 days of your live trying to account for all the deliberate and accidental quirks that system believes is necessary for you to understand it's date format. And you must account for all of that bullshit just so you can add +1 days, but -1 if the hour < 23, so it can be uploaded into system foo. It's not that you can't do it successfully, it's just that the problem is so boring and uninteresting, it would be preferable to bypass it if at all possible. Either (a) because their's no business reason to justify the 7.94 days it will require to code it or (b) because you'd rather play golf.

In answer to the next question, no, sadly I am only in .net2. The sub-question: Powershell v2 CTP (which is what I'm working in) requires only the .net2 run-time. As far as whether is "supports" .net3, I actually have no idea (sorry :(). it would certainly be nice if it could load .net3 objects, but if I had to guess, i would guess that no, it does not. At least, not without a lot of extra juggling on your part, which probably makes it nearly-irrelevant.

I am almost loath to say this, but full disclosure: As a special quirk, however, it *does* require .net3 to use certain optional features. namely a graphical UI and the command "out-grid", which allows you to pipe commands "ls | out-grid" into a graphical interactive viewer. In the current preview edition, both features are underwhelming, but I will reserve judgment on such alpha features until I see what the final versions are. I have no problems criticizing a favorite program, and have done so harshly in the past; but it's unfair to harp on what the team has called merely a preview