Saturday, March 10, 2012

Windows Powershell? Yeah, not so great!

So I was looking for an easy way to copy and rename a batch of files using a script that I could share with my friends. I was going to go old school and just write a batch script to do the job, but I thought, "hey, it's 2012 and I'm a developer, I might as well give Powershell a try." Boy was that a mistake.

After several hours of tinkering around I have yet to find a viable solution to make the script easily run on my friends' machines after it being downloaded from the internet. Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way, but I've already signed it using a custom PGP certificate that I created using Kleopatra. I also set my "ExecutionPolicy" to "AllSigned" as recommended several other bloggers. Heck I can't even get the blasted thing to run on my local machine.

Making this ridiculously difficult just to write a simple freaking script that I can share with my friends to help them out is just silly. I could have written a widget in VB.NET in half the time I put into researching Powershell that would have accomplished the same task and without having to worry about all this digital signature garbage. Just compile, zip, send, and run.

The moral of the story is that I've decided to avoid Powershell like the plague. Hopefully I'll never need to mess with it because it just gives me a massive headache thinking about digital signatures. I'm not a security expert, so this stuff is just a bother; and that's why I'm not an admin; I just develop data-driven web applications.