• My friends at Manning sent me a copy of Windows PowerShell in Action. If you’re at all interested in PS, buy this book as soon as it comes out.
• My colleague in MSIT Nick Malik wants to know the top 100 patterns every developer must know. I’d start with the ones from Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
• Jeff Atwood figures out how to wake up his computer from across the room. Money quote: “why get out of your chair and walk 20 feet when you can spend two hours figuring out how to do it without moving at all?”
• Tomas Restrepo says that WCF is too configurable. But he doesn’t really mean it because later he says that while it’s “fantastic” that WCF has so many options to tweak, he wished those options were less “in my face”. I’ve reached a similar conclusion, so I’m with you 100% Tomas.
• Scott explains how to rotate a video file. I have a whole collection of video clips taken with my wife’s digital camera where I shot portrait by mistake, so this is good to know.

• From the “Ask and ye shall receive” department: A couple weeks ago I wondered how good or bad my Gamerscore conversion rate is. MyGamerCard.net just launched a completion leaderboard where they rank you on your Gamerscore times your completion rate.
• Shane Courtrille pointed out that the prize you receive in from the Xbox Rewards program gets better if your Gamerscore is higher. With a meager 1090 points, I’m in level 1. But those with 10,000+ or more can get a copy of Fuzion Frenzy 2 for completing the challenge.
• Yesterday, I complained that code in my RSS feed looks awful. It appears to be a problem with dasBlog. In validating the HTML is actually XHTML, it screws up the white space. Of course, usually that’s not a big deal, but inside a <pre> tag, it is. Until I get a chance to submit a patch to dasBlog to fix this, I’m using CodeHTMLer, which has a “convert white space” option that doesn’t use the <pre> tag at all. As a bonus, it even support PowerShell! Note, you have to use the website, not their WLWriter plugin, if you want the convert white space option.
• There’s a new beta of Ruby.NET available. Now that I’ve moved on to PowerShell, I’m only slightly interested in Ruby these days. If I can figure out how to create internal DSLs with PS, what would I need Ruby for? (via Larkware)
• My old team just shipped a single-instance multi-tenancy SaaS sample called LitwareHR. Details are on Gianpaolo’s blog, code is up on CodePlex.

• Is there a good solution to colorize source code that looks good in RSS feeds? I’ve tried Insert Code and Paste from VS for WL Writer and both look fine in HTML but awful in RSS.
• My friend David Geller launched his latest venture Eyejot recently. Eyejot is a Flash-based video messaging system, so you can send and receive video clips without having to install anything but a webcam. According to the Eyejot blog, they’re getting some good press. See an interview with David about Eyejot up on YouTube.
• Here’s an interesting article on using WF with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Invoking MTurk isn’t that interesting – it’s just a web service and WF has a built-in InvokeWebService activity. But since MTurk has no way to asynchronously call out to the WF, you have no choice but to regularly poll MTurk to see if the task is complete. Yuck. (via Larkware)
• Yahoo! Pipes looks interesting. At least the screen shots of it on various websites and blogs look cool. Too bad the site is absolutely hammered this morning. (via Dare Obasanjo)
• Like GAT? Like DSL? Then use them together!
• If I can more than raise my Gamerscore by 1,500 points by April 12th (i.e. more than double it), I can get a free $5 game. But why wait to start the contest until next Monday? Doesn’t that discourage people from playing until then?

In yesterday’s post on PS, I provided the source for my implementation of Get-SQLServer. I realized after I made the post that there was a significant bug in the ProcessRecord method. If you specify a service instance (default or named), the cmdlet makes no effort to actually validate that such a SQL server instance exists. So if you ask for a instance that doesn’t exist, Get-SQLServer will happily write an invalid Server object to the pipeline. So I changed it to actually validate that the specified instance exists. I connect to the specified machine (local machine if not specified) using ManagedComputer and look in it’s ServerInstances collection for the specified SQL instance.

The question is, what should you do if the specified SQL instance doesn’t exist on the specified machine? One the one hand, you could write an error indicating that the SQL instance doesn’t exist. Or, you could simply write nothing to the output pipeline, which may cause an error down the line.

Which is the right approach?

At first, I wrote an error when I couldn’t find the instance, but decided that wasn’t the right approach. It isn’t really an error unless you attempt to act on that instance, right? So I thought the more PS friendly approach would be to write nothing and let the down stream cmdlets deal with it. I do write a debug message if the specified instance doesn’t exist, so the scripter isn’t completely in the dark.

So here’s the new and improved ProcessRecord method of my Get-SQLServer cmdlet:

protected override void ProcessRecord()
{
    //Make sure both -Name and -Default aren’t specified
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(_Name) && _Default.IsPresent)
    {
        WriteError(new ErrorRecord(
            new ArgumentException(
                “Default and Name parameters can’t both be specified”),
            “DefaultAndName”,
            ErrorCategory.InvalidArgument,
            null));
        return;
    }

    //If the machine name is not specified, assume the local machine
    //(via the “.” value)
    string machine = string.IsNullOrEmpty(_MachineName) ? “.” : _MachineName;

    //Connect to the specified machine via the SMO WMI ManagedComputer object
    SmoWmi.ManagedComputer mc = new SmoWmi.ManagedComputer(machine);

    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_Name) && !_Default.IsPresent)
    {
        //If neither Name or Default are specified, write all the
        //server instances on specified machine
        foreach (SmoWmi.ServerInstance si in mc.ServerInstances)
            WriteServerObject(si);

        return;
    }

    string instanceName = _Default.IsPresent ? “MSSQLSERVER” : _Name;

    if (mc.ServerInstances.Contains(instanceName))
        WriteServerObject(mc.ServerInstances[instanceName]);
    else
        WriteDebug(“The specified SQL instance does not exist”);
}

//Helper method to create a SMO Server object from a
//SMO WMI ServerInstance object and write it to the pipeline
private void WriteServerObject(SmoWmi.ServerInstance si)
{
    if (si.Name == “MSSQLSERVER”)
        WriteObject(new Smo.Server(si.Parent.Name));
    else
        WriteObject(new Smo.Server(si.Parent.Name + “\” + si.Name));
}

• I wonder what MSBuild would look like if the team had cloned drawn inspiration from Rake instead of Ant. Seems that PowerShell would have made a great foundation for build scripting.
• Looks like the digital music business is about to undergo a dramatic shift. Nick Carr and Mark Cuban have more on the possible ramifications. A friend of mine is about to move over to the Zune team. Sounds like a good time to making that switch.
• Anne Manes of the Burton Group says the time is right for UDDI, calling it the “foundation for governance”. Frankly, I think that gives UDDI a lot more credit than it’s due. We’re looking at UDDI as part of our SO infrastructure project, and I think it’s more appropriately called “one piece of the puzzle”. In my experience, the major roadblock getting projects to share technical details is desire, not discoverability. Getting information into the registry is much easier than getting teams to use that data rather than succumbing to Not Invented Here syndrome. (via Joe McKendrick)
• Jeff Snover of the PowerShell team left me a comment the I “get” PowerShell. “Getting” it may be a better description, but it’s nice to see how well engaged the PS team is in the community.
• After 13 long weeks, Lost is back!