September 14, 2010

Powershell Plus and other editors

I have been a big fan of PowershellPlus, the enhanced shell and scripting tool from Idera.  I had started experiencing issues with the application going into a “Not Responding”  state.  So the new version (3.5) was announced and I thought I would give it a try.  Same interface that drew me to the product with the clear command history, variable displays and the command completion were there.  I started using it and again it was regaining my interest.  Testing done, now lets use it…. Uhoh! I can only suspect this is an issue with PowershellPlus and Quest AD Management tools not working well together but… I was doing a pretty simple query of computers using the Quest get-qadcomputer cmdlet.  Simple output of:

Get-QADComputer -SearchRoot 'somedomain.com/Some OU' -SearchScope 'Subtree' | select Name, ParentContainer

looks as expected.  I prepended to a variable with:

$test = Get-QADComputer -SearchRoot 'somedomain.com/Some OU' -SearchScope 'Subtree' | select Name, ParentContainer

$test.count returns a number in the range I was expecting as it shows 113, so lets look at the output of $test … WTH! it shows 11 items which equated to a specific ParentContainer and the “Not Responding” state surfaced again but not as severe.  Odd, so I test in a standard Powershell CLI and $test.count returns 113 again, and when I check the contents of $test, the screen shows lines of what would be expected of 113 records. 

I will look at this but I have to say my loyalty to this product is done.  On the upside, since I have taken a new position, I have been evangelizing Powershell amongst the Windows SystemAdmins so I have been suggesting PowerGUI and even more the Powershell ISE.  Some of the main features (automatic code-signing, V2 comment based help template, etc…) that I used to favor PowerShellPlus have been showing up in these products.  If you can’t work with the Quest AD cmdlets that’s a deal breaker for me.

I am thinking my blog entries with be adorned with this from here on out….

My PowerShell IDE is PowerGUI