Archive for the ‘Powershell’ Category
About features of LinkedIn…
Sometimes people ask me to join their groups. Unfortunately, I can’t. I can’t join group for a couple of years. And here is why:
“Hi Frances,
many months ago I exceeded the number of groups I could join. It even seems to me that in early times people could join more groups than these days. This means that to try to join one more group I need to leave several groups.
This experiment (leaving group by group until I could join a group) is very odd to me. Sorry, Frances. Linkedin should say sorry, of course, but these guys do strange things instead of things that people need (extended group membership, for example).
What is the idea to allow people set pluses on other people’s skills? I had a number of pluses set on those skills I never had. What is the meaning of this feature? I have five pluses set on Jira (the service I never used), seven pluses on Oracle (the last time I used Oracle was in 2004).
I think that our (ordinary users’) common task is to press this team (Linkedin’s) to make the service more meaningful to us.
Alex”
A minor LinkedIn bug
Case-sensitive or case-insensitive are LinkedIn skills? The question seems odd. However, yesterday I faced constant red flag of a user-added skill. A colleague of mine marked my skill, let’s call it hereafter ‘myskill’. I glanced at the red flag and expected it to disappear. The flag disappears, unless I open another browser page with LinkedIn, or browser, or device.
The red flag remained red for several hours.
I started thinking that there is something wrong (not that I think too slowly. Maybe slowly, okay. I created a blog post based, as usual, on a real app, and found a couple of bugs in my framework. And after all this the flag was still red). I found ‘myskill’ in my skills. There were no counter, strangely. I tried to delete and re-create it.
After several experiments, I finally got that I have ‘MySkill’ that is not marked, ‘myskill’ that is marked by colleague and the flag.
After deleting ‘MySkill’, the red flag has gone, eventually.
A LinkedIn user’s manifesto
Today, I wanted again to endorse a person’s skills. Again, I failed miserably: if you are not connected to a person, no skills can be endorsed. Id est, there are no skilled people outside your network? Or a person can’t be skilled if he/she is not a friend of you? A book, you have just read and enjoyed, it’s not yet a reason to set a plus to the author’s skills, only ‘connected authors’ are skillful.
We users, who else, should say that LinkedIn has flaws in the network logic. I sent the following letter:
Hello,
I have 495 connections and LinkedIn says that the limit of invitations is applied. Okay, could you DECREASE the limit to 2900 invitations (instead of 3000 that every LinkedIn user is born with)?
It seems to me that some restrictions of LinkedIn are not well set up. For example, I want to check people’s skills, those who
– wrote free open-source products or frameworks that I use with pleasure
– wrote great technical books that I enjoyed
– share cutting-edge technical information via blogging, twittering, etc
Isn’t it strange that I should be in contact personally with the author of a book or a framework to clearly show to others that I admire his/her skills?
Is a book or a framework a bit worse if I’m not acquainted with the author?
This restriction is merely nonsense. Are you afraid of the possibility that I’ll be marking every and each’s skills? I could mark all my connections, had I wanted so.
Another point of view is about the point where people obtain technical information. My connections share blog posts, tweets, re-tweets, interesting pages. By limiting me (or a user of yours), what the purpose you are going to achieve? To force people collect and absorb information outside LinkedIn?
Well, protecting from salesmen and similar folks is a necessity. I was asked by three, or four, or even terrifying five people to buy a chair or a software product, or about some sponsoring. Excellent, without your security I could be asked for something ten of more times, thanks for your work.
Again, what’s about my limit? 495 connections is not the number that should prevent me from initiating new connections.
Alexander
Tip of the day: setting the size of browser’s window
Sometimes, you need to set a window to a particular size. Not a problem, in the one-liner below we start Firefox and set height and width:
Start-SeFirefox | ConvertTo-SeAutomationElement | Invoke-UIAWindowTransformResize -TransformResizeWidth 500 -TransformResizeHeight 200;
Tip of the day: using wildcards in UIAutomation
One of amazing features of PowerShell cmdlets is supporting so-called wildcards. What are wildcards? The characters that substitute one or more, or even all of the characters in the string.
For example, you need to simplify your code:Start-Process calc -PassThru | Get-UIAWindow | Get-UIAButton -Name a* | Invoke-UIAButtonClick;This code presses the plus button, the button that is named Add.
Imagine that you need to press the Reciprocal button and you’ll immediately love wildcards.
Metro automation: getting started
After a long hiatus, yesterday, I suddenly thought that it’s the time to return to Metro automation. To my surprise, rumors have been already circulating that Windows 8 Next Preview is upcoming in hours. Intuition? Maybe. In time is in time.
Yesterday I added to UIAutomaitonSpy the functionality to run PowerShell scripts. Today I polished a bit (here is great volume of work to do).
Let’s start. I tested the following on Windows 8 CP x64 and Windows 8 RP x86 (Release Preview of June, 01st). The binaries was built on a Windows 8 CP x64 box.
C
1. download the package. It’s not the default release now.
2. Unpack the package to a certain directory. We need to put in a secure location. One of them is %SystemRoot%, the other is %ProgramFiles%. The latter is more appropriate. In my tests, I creates the “C:\Program Files\1” directory and put the binaries there. You have in the folder UIAutomationSpy.exe, the config, UIAutomation.dll and TMX.dll.
3. One more file you’ve got is a certificate. You need to install it. Alternatively, you can sign UIAutomationSpy.exe with the certificate you possibly have.
Otherwise, below are screenshots. Run certmgr, for example, from cmd.exe and follow the pictures:
After you installed the certificate and the application in the secure location (you might set the policy not to require this if you’d like to), you can run the application.
For the first test, just run the application, agree with UAC and manually run the Start screen by pressing the Win button. Now you should see something like on the picture below:
On the picture, UIAutomationSpy shows the code for the Mail tile. It is bordered with the red rectangle. All that I’d like to offer is to explore tiles:
This is a text box, Edit in terms of UIAutomation.
Tomorrow I’m planning to start discussing how to write and run scripts for Metro UI.
W8: if Task Manager had previews…
I just wondering why Task Manager is deprived of icon pop-ups that apllications in TaskBar have.
PowerShell Wizard. Round 2. It works!
After posting the wizard sample, I thought – why don’t finish it today? I added
- the Finish and the Cancel buttons in a way that the Finish button asks the user whether one wishes to exit now or not. The Cancel is available on the first step and by clicking this the user quits immediately
- scriptblocks, used as a code that is run on clicking the Next button
- fixed bugs, added comments here and there and a bit of polishing
At first, I’d like to show what the sample does.
It starts the wizard, sets the second step as the first the user sees (just for example) and provides a label saying that the wizard is awaiting for a path to any directory.
After that the user presses the next button (it stays here if the text box field is empty. The wrong path won’t be accepted too) and goes to the next step called, just for example, the Progress step:
The step called in the sample as Output contains a list box filled with the files list:
After all, at the last step can be written something encouradging, or an error log to be shown, or something else. There comes the Finish button, as well as the Cancel button comes at the first step of the wizard:
Now, after we know what this does, I can post the code running the sample:
# Step 1: Welcome
New-WizardStep 'Welcome' `
'This is the first step' `
'Welcome to the PowerShell Wizard, the our dear customer!';
# Add a label
# Please note that we can use the enumeration $steps which is being created runtime
# on a call of the New-WizardStep function
Add-ControlToStep $steps.Welcome `
System.Windows.Forms.Label `
'lblWelcome' 20 10 50 300 `
'This Wizard carries you through the steps you need to collect the files from a given path';
# Step 2
New-WizardStep 'Input' `
'Step Two' `
'Here you type some in controls, plz';
# Add a label
Add-ControlToStep $steps.Input `
System.Windows.Forms.Label `
'lblInput' 20 10 20 300 `
'Please type the path to a catalog';
# Add a text box
Add-ControlToStep $steps.Input `
System.Windows.Forms.TextBox `
'txtInput' 40 10 20 300
# Add the code which requires that text box was not empty
Add-CodeToStep $steps.Input `
-StepCode {
[string]$private:path = `
$wzdSteps[$steps.Input].Controls['txtInput'].Text;
if ($private:path.Length -eq 0)
{
# stop the step
throw;
}
if (-not [System.IO.Directory]::Exists($private:path))
{
# stop the step
throw;
}
}
# Step 3
New-WizardStep 'Progress' `
'The third one' `
'Wait, please. Sip a coffee' ;
# Add a progress bar
Add-ControlToStep $steps.Progress `
'System.Windows.Forms.ProgressBar' `
'pbDir' 200 50 100 400
Add-CodeToStep $steps.Progress `
-StepCode {
# set progress bar maximum
$wzdSteps[$steps.Progress].Controls['pbDir'].Minimum = 0;
$wzdSteps[$steps.Progress].Controls['pbDir'].Value = 0;
$wzdSteps[$steps.Progress].Controls['pbDir'].Maximum = `
(Get-ChildItem $wzdSteps[$steps.Input].Controls['txtInput'].Text).Length;
# clear the list box (from the next step)
$wzdSteps[$steps.Output].Controls['lbxFiles'].Items.Clear();
# add file names to the list box
Get-ChildItem $wzdSteps[$steps.Input].Controls['txtInput'].Text | %{
$wzdSteps[$steps.Progress].Controls['pbDir'].Value++;
$wzdSteps[$steps.Output].Controls['lbxFiles'].Items.Add($_.Name);
}
}
# Step 4
New-WizardStep 'Output' 'Fourth' `
'Now awake and read the output';
# Add a list box
Add-ControlToStep $steps.Output `
System.Windows.Forms.ListBox `
lbxFiles 50 50 300 400
# Step 5: Finish
New-WizardStep 'Finish' 'Finish!' 'Bye!';
Initialize-Wizard;
# Set the second step as active
Invoke-WizardStep -Forward $true;
$script:frmWizard.ShowDialog() | Out-Null;
The full version is posted in the box at rigth and published on the PoshCode. Ask for a doc or more comments in the code if you need to.
Kindle for PowerShellers. Part 3. Reading your favorite blogs. Instapaper
In the previous post of this series, we tested Amazon’s blog subscription. Now we must review an alternative solution, because it’s so common in the modern world to have free and/or open source counterparts of almost every application. I’d like to announce the Instapaper service review!
At first, let’s look at their version of how to publish blogs. The Contents is, in my opinion, better than the one Amazon compiles (but contents list of newspapers and magazines I like the most):
The View Articles List layout is exactly the very layout in Amazon’s subscriptions:
The following pictures display the article itself, the same one we tested earlier:
No pictures is added to an article, thus I’ll give only one screenshot to help you comprehend how much and, at the same time, how infinitesimal the difference between paid and free solutions.
The paid solution provides pictures, but the free one provides the better contents list. One thing to finish this comparison is to go the same way the user must go every time one wishes to download a new issue.
After registration on the Instapaper page, the registration is free, but you are given the possibility to pay $1 a month to support the project, you might begin collecting your articles list. Mine, used as an example for the subscription shown above, is today as follows:
The figure shows several noticeable things:
- The ‘Add folders’ link to make the Contents of your issue organized in a manner you’d prefer
- The ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet, the mechanism which you will use to gather pages you want to have in the issue
- The Download options, where the central of them allows you to compile the issue right now and download it to a computer, whence you may sent it to a Kindle through wire or air.
I rarely use the first bullet owing to the perpetual lack of time, so that let’s immediately discuss the second one. After installing the bookmarklet, all the work you need to perform is to navigate to a page you want to add and to click the button. A monotonous, but not a very long and Amazon’s paiments-free task.
When your collection is replete with articles and you are ready to compile the issue (automated compilation and sending to a Kindle never worked for me), it’s about time to visit the ‘Account Settings’ section:
By clicking on the ‘Manage my Kindle settings’ link, you are in the very heart of your subscription:
Here you may set delivery settings and the address of your Kindle. Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save changes’ button. Also, here is one of the most interesting features of this service, the ‘Send now’ button, the button I used to demonstrate the issue.
Kindle for PowerShellers. Part 2. Reading your favorite blogs. The Amazon’s way
The Kindle gives great possibilities to read blogs you accustomed to follow. The first way to do that is what Amazon offers – the blog subscription. The number of blogs you may choose to subscribe is significant, so that there are ratings, categorizing and search helping you.
By today, the extent of quality of pictures and the usability of reading long lines of text and code are not what all the users agree to accept. Therefore, the two weeks’ trial is the time you may decide whether you need or needn’t to subscribe. No more restrictions here, even hundreds of blogs can be tested for two weeks.
To see what does a PowerShell blog on a Kindle like, let’s take one of officials blogs, the PowerShell Guy blog. Below is today’s article:
As can be seen, pictures are now allowed in blogs as well as in newspapers (only several months ago pictures were almost prohibited here and there, in newspapers). Unfortunately, pictures are not of perfect quality due to the promise to deliver a blog in sixty seconds including the transmitting over 3G networks. On the other hand, technical blogs are not for seeing photos.
Amazon provides two options to see more on pictures: to increase on a click
and to visit the source by clicking on the small icon at the right side of a picture.
Articles are collected to a something like a newspaper (newspapers I like more because of their Contents style):
Even with the smallest available font size the contents is worse, to my mind, than those in a newspaper:
The contents in a newspaper or in a magazin is always of one page, whilst for the blog we took we see seven pages, what is sometimes even more than in some books of a thousand pages.
Owing to the discrepancy between text rendering in an HTML page and the Kindle screen, text and code are readable, but even with the smallest font the lines are longer than the width of a Kindle screen:
To conclude this review (and to turn to a review of alternative ways to read blogs), there’s time to say that you are usually charged to pay for this service from $0.99 to $1.99 a month. So that it’s your clue to choose blogs that to be updated daily or weekly, the more the blog is informative, the more often it gets updated, the more money Amazon ask for reading it.
PowerShell In GUI Blog 
