More than one way to do it, Part I - Powershell

Monday, June 9, 2008

So my ~~coworker~~, err boss :) seems to have started playing with Powershell, which is great. It looks like his first foray into PowerShell development is a commandlet for tibco ems topics. My initial feeling on this is that the benefits of commandlets syntax checking are not worth the tax of compiling and installing it. I would've used a native PowerShell approach. On the other hand, a full navigation provider...

function Get-TibcoTopic([string]$topicName, 
                        [string]$url="tcp://localhost:7222", 
                        [string]$username="admin", 
                        [string]$password)
{
    $null = [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("C:\tibco\ems\clients\cs\TIBCO.EMS.dll")
    $null = [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("C:\tibco\ems\clients\cs\TIBCO.EMS.ADMIN.dll")
    $admin = new-object TIBCO.EMS.ADMIN.Admin -arg $url, $username, $password
    $admin.Topics  | ? { $_.Name -eq $topicName } 
}

But I am seeing this a lot with myself and coworkers around new technologies. I guess the first step in learning a technology is getting something that works, and the second phase is getting something implemented the right way. For me, I'm struggling with WPF. I wanted to implement a bullet graph and do with the right way so that if I wanted a more traditional gauge approach, highway just need to swap out the template. I couldn't get it to work so I switched to implementing the control as the panel. It feels wrong, and I know I'm going to run into trouble with it shortly, but at least it works.

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