This morning my daughter asked my wife how many days there were\u00a0until Christmas. That conversation didn’t go so well.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42\u00a0\u00a0 Seriously though, this year things started super early.\u00a0 The local store started selling Christmas stuff before Halloween and a couple of weeks ago our neighbors put up their Christmas lights.\u00a0 I can understand why my daughter is getting whipped up into an Christmas frenzy.\u00a0 That said, as my wife contemplates a big day of effort for Thanksgiving, I can understand\u00a0why questions about Christmas are\u00a0not welcome.<\/p>\n
PowerShell to the rescue (seriously).<\/p>\n
This morning’s drama played out while I was at the computer reviewing Doug Finke’s<\/a>\u00a0table of contents for a PowerShell for Developers book he is starting to write.\u00a0 (looks like it\u00a0is going to be great!). \u00a0I called my daughter over to explain what a wonderful tool PowerShell was.\u00a0 I explained that if she ever wanted to get\u00a0the date, all she had to do was to type “Get-Date”.\u00a0 I then explained how she could cast a string containing a date into a datetime object:\u00a0 [Datetime]”12\/25\/2011″ .\u00a0 She didn’t get that one so I quickly moved on to explain that the reason why that mattered is that PowerShell is … well … powerful and that it does something called “object math”.\u00a0 Object math (the ability to perform mathematical operations on any object which supports them) made everyone’s life easier because that means you can do things like: Today I’ll convert this to a proper function with a proper name and install it on my daughter’s machine so that she will always know how many seconds until Christmas and won’t have to ask my wife.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n PowerShell solves all sorts of problems!\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This morning my daughter asked my wife how many days there were\u00a0until Christmas. That conversation didn’t go so well.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42\u00a0\u00a0 Seriously though, this year things started super early.\u00a0 The local store started selling Christmas stuff before Halloween and a couple … Continue reading
\nPS> [DateTime]<\/span>“12\/25\/2011”<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>–<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>(<\/span>Get-Date<\/span>)
\n<\/span>Days\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 34
\nHours\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 13
\nMinutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 21
\nSeconds\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 12
\nMilliseconds\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 588
\nTicks\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 29856725886382
\nTotalDays\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 34.556395701831
\nTotalHours\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 829.353496843944
\nTotalMinutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 49761.2098106367
\nTotalSeconds\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 : 2985672.5886382
\nTotalMilliseconds : 2985672588.6382<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nHer face lit up like a Christmas tree!\u00a0 I then remembered this was a repeat of something that happened years ago so I used Bing to search for “Snover daughter PowerShell Christmas” and found my Days Till Xmas <\/a>post back in 2006 when we still called it Monad.\u00a0 We didn’t have the Get-Date Cmdlet back then so I used [DateTime]::Now but notice that this script uses the YEAR property and string math to always calculate the days till this years Christmas.<\/span>
\nfunction<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>tillXmas<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>(<\/span>)<\/span>
\n{<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>$now<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>=<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>[DateTime]<\/span>::<\/span>Now<\/span>
\n<\/span>[Datetime]<\/span>(<\/span>“12\/25\/”<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>+<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>$now<\/span>.<\/span>Year<\/span>)<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>–<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>$Now<\/span>
\n}<\/span><\/p>\n