The near-complete obviation of nulls is perhaps the most frequently- (and hilariously-) cited benefit of working in F#, as compared to C#. Nulls certainly still exist in F#, but as a practical matter it really is quite rare that they need to be considered explicitly within an all-F# codebase. It turns out this cuts both ways. On those infrequent occasions where one does need to check for nulls, F# actually makes it surprisingly difficult to do so safely and efficiently. In this post I’ve tried to aggre[...]

Working on the command line with Powershell, much of the time I have the luxury of dealing directly with rich .NET objects.  If I need to sort, filter, or otherwise process cmdlet output, I have easy access to typed properties and methods right at the prompt. Often, though, I'll need to wrangle plain text, perhaps … Continue reading A handy Powershell filter for converting plain text to objects →

Working on the command line with Powershell, much of the time I have the luxury of dealing directly with rich .NET objects.  If I need to sort, filter, or otherwise process cmdlet output, I have easy access to typed properties and methods right at the prompt. Often, though, I’ll need to wrangle plain text, perhaps from a log file or the output of an executable.  In these cases an intermediate step is required in order to extract the typed information (timestamps, substrings, numerical fields, etc) from th[...]

5 years ago today, I sent the following bug report to the Powershell team. From: Lincoln Atkinson Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2010 10:33 PM To: PowerShell Discussions Subject: Problem with get-date Hey experts, maybe you can help me with this issue. Get-Date seems totally broken for me. I've tried it multiple times with all different … Continue reading Bug with Powershell Get-Date →

5 years ago today, I sent the following bug report to the Powershell team. From: Lincoln Atkinson Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2010 10:33 PM To: PowerShell Discussions Subject: Problem with get-date Hey experts, maybe you can help me with this issue. Get-Date seems totally broken for me. I've tried it multiple times with all different parameters, but it's just not working in my environment. I'm still single and I haven't gotten a date in months :-( Get-Help really wasn't useful this time. Funny, since [...]