I could not pass the opportunity to blog about PowerShell for today’s T-SQL Tuesday hosted by Wayne Sheffield (b | t). I will be frank, I’m not a subject matter expert or pretend to be one on the Internet when it comes to PowerShell, but I enjoy trying to do new things with it.

I have found Powershell to be a great utility to me on a day to day basis to automate activities I repeatedly perform when I’m developing software. Being able to use the .Net Framework, I usually write ps1 scripts to prepare my databases when testing features I’m developing. I’ll make this short and sweet; I have one tip to share, and one script that might come in handy.

First of all, if you don’t do so already, you should customize your environment by adding a directory path to your scripts in your Environment Variables. If you don’t know how to do this, simply read this How To Add/Edit Environment Variables in Windows 7.

For Visual Studio users:

Now that you added scripts to your Paths, open Visual Studio and test a script in you scripts directory by calling the command on your Visual Studio Package Manager Console. The Package Manager Console is a Powershell console and will execute any Powershell command. I spend most of my day developing in C#, and I write PoSH scripts to assist me in preparing data when I'm running unit test to try code out. The best part, I simply use the Package Manager Console to execute the commands. 

For everone:

Lastly, I wanted to share a little script I been playing around with, and I did this for a session I wrote and presented in Albuquerque's SQL Saturday #183. The jist is, we all have that "squirrel" effect when searching exceptions or some solutions to your problems. I remember the days of green text and black screen, and spending time online was simple; you find what you are looking for and then you're out. It's not the case anymore, for instance, say you're started searching for "SQL Server CTE" examples and 45 minutes later realize you have been watching YouTube videos of kittens. 

To resolve this productivity issue, I created a Stack Overflow text browser in PowerShell (pictured above). The code is simple, and it's online on my github. Utilizing Invoke-WebRequest, I search a query and return a number of question asked in plain text. Like the good old days, you select the question you want to read about and out returns the answers. I do this on my Package Manager Console when I'm working on Visual Studio. I hope some of you enjoy this little script and tip as I will work to improve it and add more features.