Lee Holmes has made available a proof of concept version of his Background Shell — a simple PowerShell host that runs in the background and can execute script based on global hotkeys …

In all honestly, this is pretty cool, and even cooler if you tie in some features like WASP to automate regular windows tasks. I was actually planning on releasing a global-hotkey cmdlet built into PoshConsole to allow you to do basically the same thing as this, but I’ve been holding off because I need a month or two more on my current project before I can get back to really working on PoshConsole, and I wanted to use the release of this stuff as a springboard to rekindle interest.

Anyway, go get BgShell … and lets hear some ideas about what could be done with it!

So, if you’re a big fan of unit-testing or test-driven development, you’ve probably heard of MbUnit and if you’ve been following MbUnit development, then you’ll have at least heard a rumor that with version 3 they were working on a new test-runner, and now it’s finally starting to show up.

It’s open source (under the Apache License), and Gallio is now in Alpha, with support for running MbUnit tests, but also NUnit, xUnit.net and NBehave … and includes integration and tool support which is unparalleled: integration with CCNet and NAnt, MSBuild and the new Microsoft Research testing tool Pex and … well, lots of other tools you can read about on their website … my point is that it has PowerShell integration!

Although Gallio includes it’s own command-line runner called Echo, and a very nice GUI called Icarus, they’ve also included a PowerShell cmdlet test-runner which supports more options that you can shake a stick at (see source code here), including allowing you to choose LocalAppDomain, IsolatedAppDomain, or IsolatedProcess test runners, etc.

That’s all I’ve got for now … this is only the second alpha release, but feel free to check it out anyway, the test model is complete, and it’s actually running tests without major issues.

This is the first in what I hope will be an occasional series of tips for PowerShell users: short posts which don’t intend to give guidance, but merely a tip on a feature you may not be aware of, or maybe even answers to some of the recurring questions that come up in #PowerShell. We’ll see how this goes …

My first tip to power users is to remember the priority which PowerShell assigns to things by default:

1. Alias
2. Function (and Filter)
3. Cmdlet
4. ExternalScript
5. Application
6. Files with associations

This means that using an Alias, you can override anything (and since you can’t have multiple aliases with the same name, that makes aliases the ultimate way to disambiguate commands).

Functions and filters (there’s really no such thing as a filter) come before cmdlets (yes, even built-in cmdlets) and scripts (that is, your .ps1 files which are in your path, and are called “ExternalScripts” by PowerShell) come before applications, which come before scripts written in other languages, like .vbs or .bat or .cmd (even though they’re all shown as “Application” type commands, PowerShell prioritizes apps over executable scripts which are associated with an engine).

Incidentally, I’m not actually sure what a “Script” is (it’s a CommandType for Get-Command, but there aren’t any on my PCs) if anyone can run get-command -type "Script" and get something output, please let me know what it was.

It’s important to understand that this precedence order is not what you get if you run Get-Command (Get-Command merely orders everything alphabetically by name). In fact, as far as I know, PowerShell doesn’t give you a way to get a list of commands in the order that they would execute, nor does it specify any way of determining that order in the documentation. If you would like to see the proper order, you could use the following “filter” function, and sort by Order bearing in mind that it really only works precisely when you type the full command without wildcards.

Oh, by the way, in case it’s not obvious … “luimcxp” is the second letter of each “CommandType” (which is unique in each one) in the order that I think they belong in … so IndexOf( $($_.CommandType)[1] ) gives us the correct ordering for the command in $_.

After some time out of commission, I’ve cleaned up the PowerShell Bloggers feed pipe and made it work again. I also added a few blogs (there’s now 23) and fixed it so it cleans out the media links (mostly people’s avatars, it makes it readable on the Yahoo! page) and it also assigns the “author” tag so that everyone’s on similar footing.

Incidentally, the one other thing this does that makes it better than just copying the OPML, is that it filters using a regular expression to only show the posts that are actually about PowerShell … if you think I’ve missed someone, or if I need to tweak the filter or the feed’s output further … let me know.