I received an email asking about more easily calling Windows APIs from PowerShell. I don't know much about calling Windows APIs, but the included samples looked a bit clunky to extend, so I tried to simplify them somewhat.

Some snippets of code from my PowerShell profile that might be useful to others; including coloured server names for remote PowerShell sessions and launching Visual Studio for thesolutions in the current folder.

A small, but useful, PowerShell function that I have in my PowerShell profile that reads the default repo path from .hg\hgrc and launches it in the default browser. This means after I've done hg push I can just ype kiln to quickly get to the repo page to raise code reviews, etc.

I don't like the idea of paying for (or installing) a tool to just show me some simple relationships between my Visual Studio projects, but it's something that is pretty useful when trying to tidy up a huge legacy codebase.

If you subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter you'll probably know I'm quite a fan of NuGet. Recently I was playing around with Andrew Nurse's PSGet module that wraps NuGet.exe for PowerShell (which, by the way, is an awesome idea, and should be added as built-in functionality!). I decided a good way to learn a little more about PowerShell would be to try and add Tab Expansion to PSGet, similar to the functionality in the Visual Studio Package Manager Console.

I've been meaning to look into PowerShell for a while - it's been on an ever-growing list of things I'd like to learn more about. Recently I got around to spending some time with it and decided an interesting way to learn a little would be to create a module that allowed you to format objects using the Razor Engine.

[System.Activator]::CreateInstance($type)