Microsoft PowerShell

our team!
colors!

Inspiration

We wanted to improve Microsoft PowerShell, an open-source command-line shell with over 8 million users in the last month. Our mentors from Microsoft, Tyler and Rob, enabled us to contribute more than we would have otherwise.

What we did

We fixed a variety of existing issues and added new features. We added new features to Select-String: 1, 2, 3, fixed the -WhatIf parameter for New-FileCatalog, added functionality to the split command, sendMail command, convert to XML command, and added new error messages to Get-Process.

Github Gist

How we built it

We used C# for fixes and adding new features and PowerShell for writing test cases.

Challenges we ran into

We spent a lot of time trying to understand the existing codebase before we were able to add our own code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to submit our first pull requests to an open source project.

What we learned

Contributing to PowerShell taught us how to contribute to open source projects, navigate larger codebases, use common PowerShell commands, and write clean code.

What's next for Microsoft PowerShell

We will be following up with updates and suggestions to our pull requests so that we can eventually get them merged.

Built With

c#
powershell

Submitted to

HackIllinois 2019

Created by

I added a switch for the Select-String command to return output as strings instead of MatchInfo instances.

david-wang24
I worked on multiple new features of powershell. I implemented a new argument type for the -split expression, where the user can input a negative "limit" to start the splitting process from the back of the string being split. Also, changed the sendEmail command to not need a "Subject" parameter. Lastly I added functionality to the ConvertTo-Xml command to accept a flag indicating that the user wants to print out in "CliXml" format.

Jacob Scott
I worked on fixing the Whatif function with @mjanko in Powershell

MarekZietek
I worked on and fixed an issue with @MarekZietek. This was about making the -WhatIf parameter work for the New-FileCatalog command in PowerShell. Later wrote a test case for it. Then sent a pull request to GitHub.

mjanko5 Jankowski
I added an OnlyMatching parameter to Select-String to return only the string that matches the pattern, similar to grep -o

Nanyi Yang
I worked on the Powershell team to solve requests from others. I helped with clearing up confusion regarding the command Start-Process

Muhammed Imran
I added coloring for the text matched by the Regex provided to the Select-Process command with help from the mentors from the Microsoft PowerShell team. If the user's terminal does not support color, it surrounds the text with asterisks instead.

Derek Xia