Command line (or equivalent) tools for .NET development
The most critical PowerShell commands are Get-Command (alias gcm) and Get-Member (alias gm). Those two commands allow you to explore and exploit most of the functionality available. Get-Member is great for interactively exploring and working with .NET objects.
The other useful series of commands are:
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom($relativepath)[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile($absolutepath)which allow you to load other assemblies into PowerShell to work with them.
In my larger projects, I started to create customized build.cmd batch files which themselves call command line tools like:
- graspx to check .aspx files,
- osql to generate C# code from an SQLÂ Server database schema and backup the development database,
- scptxfr to script the schema,
- msbuild to build applications,
- devenv to build setup solutions,
- 7za (7-Zip) to zip stuff.
An occasional IISReset also helps ;)