Cranking out Code

Today I had an epiphany of how powerful PowerShell is. I was using a dependency visualizer named Dependency Visualizer (http://www.codeplex.com/dependencyvisualizer) to try to get a quick overview of how the projects were related in a fairly large system. The problem was that if I used the Dependency Visualizer on the solution file, which contains close to 150 projects I would get a rather nasty overview. What I wanted to do was to execute the Dependency Visualizer on each project file in the directory any sub-directory within it. To do that I realized I could probably use PowerShell. Off I went to install it and 5 minutes later I had the following:

> dir -recurse -filter *.csproj | % { &"c:\program files\dependency visualizer\dependencyvisualizer.exe" $_.FullName}

Which for each file with the extension csproj within this directory and any sub-directory execute the dependencyvisualizer.exe with the full name as an argument. This produced an svg image for each project file on my file system. Extremely powerful!