> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
> Behalf Of Tom Metro
>
> So are you parsing HTML, or does Microsoft provide a supported API?
Oh - Got it. I wouldn't call it an API, but MS does provide an interface.
Powershell. A lot of people are not well familiar with powershell, so I'll
describe it a little here ...
<background info>
It's an incredibly powerful abomination. ;-) If you've done any sort of
shell or scripting or any other kind of language or command prompt on any other
system (including windows) then all of your past experience is an inhibition to
understanding powershell. Which is why I call it an abomination. But once you
get past all that, (probably because some requirement at work has committed you
to using it whether you like it or not) you start digging into it, and discover
it's insanely powerful.
It uses a C#-like syntax, and natively supports .Net data objects. So for
example in shell scripting, you'll have some command that pipes to another
command, and the interface between the two is a serial text stream. In
powershell, you have a command (for example, Get-ADUser, which returns .Net
objects representing users in active directory) and pipe them into another
command (such as Set-ADUser, which allows you to modify user objects) and the
interface between the two is passing the actual class instances, data
structures, not just serial text. All in all, that's probably the one best
feature. Completely eliminates the need for things like sed and awk and other
string parsing stuff, which often fails. Natively supported by the shell, you
have object oriented access to read/modify/filter/parse components of the data
structure objects. Plus, you can do stuff like try {} catch {}, and foreach (
$User in Get-ADUser ) { Set-ADUser -Identity $User.DistinguishedName -Passwor
dNeverExpires $false } ... etc. Very powerful, with lots of drawbacks. A
complete stark deviation from any other skills you've ever learned, with
absolutely no cross platform compatibility. Very windows exclusive.
There is at least one project out there, aiming to implement open source
powershell on mono. Mono can handle it, but the oss powershell project is
extremely limited and not very functional yet.
</background info>
So all in all, what I do is this:
In my phone, I have an app, which lets me select a new alias. When I click
"submit," the app posts that info to a https URL, which is handled by my Win7
box in the basement. The win7 box uses powershell to update info at office365,
and when it's done, it sends me a test email, which also serves as a
notification (I receive the email on my phone) that the new alias creation has
completed, and is ready for use.
If there were an open source powershell, I'd love to use it. Or something like
a restful api, I'd also love to use that. But no. Not that I'm aware of.
> So it'd be pretty decent, had they not arbitrarily crippled t.
They might have a technical limitation that just *appears* to be arbitrary...
;-)
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