René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Consider revising PERF-02","articleBody":"I have some suggestions for improving \"PERF-02 Consider trade-offs between performance and readability\". I hope it's OK to group multiple \"issues\" here rather than spamming the Issues section. \r\n\r\nThe first issue, the page directs a user to drop into using a .NET framework to do something (basically read a file) when a PowerShell cmdlet already exists to do the same thing. The page actually called out the appropriate cmdlet a moment before. This is in contradiction to other advice that, generally, you should avoid using .NET or external tool when PowerShell can effectively do the same thing. \r\n\r\nSecond, the page uses the .NET code to do something that PowerShell handles natively with the Pipeline. I use Powershell a lot in my professional career, and I can say that 80% of time I'm handling collections of objects. Which computers in this list have x.yy version of Audio Driver? Which AD users are locked and/or password expired? The pipeline is king, the king is dead, all hail the king. \r\n\r\nGet-Content -Path file.txt | ForEach-Object -Process { \u003c#...#\u003e } \r\nOf the options in the article, this is absolutely the best way to approach the input. \r\n\r\nHeck, even \"one object\" collections circumstantially benefit from going through the pipeline. Consider the scenario, I want widget.exe to not run. For the purpose of this example I expect at most one instance of wdiget.exe to run. And maybe it's not running presently, I don't care. But I certainly want to stop, if it is running. \r\nStop-Process -Name widget\r\nThis will generate an error if widget.exe is not running. I don't want an error message in this case. If I'm stopping on errors, this will break the script. \r\n\r\nGet-Process -Name widget | Stop-Process\r\nEven if there is never 2 or more instances of widget.exe, this is the best way to handle the use case (and IMO, it looks great). If the process is not running, then nothing gets passed to Stop-Process. Rather than generating an error, Stop-Process just sits there and twiddles its thumbs. \r\n\r\nLess important but worth mentioning, the page uses what Wikipedia would call \"Weasel words.\" See:\r\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch#Unsupported_attributions\r\nExamples, \"many folks in the community\", \"Most folks\", \"Some would argue\". Who are these people, and why should I care? I was sysadmin at a factory and I love the assembly line approach to my control scripts. I often script in this format:\r\n```\r\nparam (\r\n    # Bunch of variables I might want to customize in the future\r\n)\r\n\r\n# in production, functions actually reside in a module psm1 file I wrote, which I import here\r\nfunction Verb-Stuff {\r\n    param ( \r\n        [parameter(Mandatory,ValueFromPipeline)][type]$Object\r\n        # Other parameters ...\r\n    )\r\n    Process {\r\n        try {\r\n            # Do stuff ...\r\n        } \r\n        catch {\r\n            # error handling\r\n        }\r\n    }\r\n}\r\n\r\nGet-Stuff -Property $Parameter | Where-Object { \u003c#filter stuff#\u003e } | Verb-Stuff | Out-Stuff \r\n\r\n```\r\nI find the above to be very aesthetically pleasing, and easy to follow. I understand that not everyone will agree, but honestly I don't care. Aesthetics are nice when talking about tab lengths, max line lengths, NamingConventions, etc. When you are writing code in production, \"aesthetics\" are not a good reason to change the function of the code. To do so risks unplanned problems.\r\n","author":{"url":"https://github.com/jdtrouble","@type":"Person","name":"jdtrouble"},"datePublished":"2020-12-03T15:12:35.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":1},"url":"https://github.com/148/PowerShellPracticeAndStyle/issues/148"}