Lately I’ve been working on trying to author PowerShell cmdlets with Visual Studio 2010 to talk to a web service. At first glance, I thought it would be easy. I had the WSDL and XSD files, and the webservice side of things is already working. There’s a web GUI that communicates via SOAP to the underlying hardware & software — building some cmdlets should be a snap, or so I thought.
First up, I must admit that I have zero C# experience. I’ve got a good amount of object oriented programming and scripting experience, so the concept of looping, conditionals, arrays, objects, methods, properties, etc. are not foreign to me. I’ve always believed, all things being equal, that programming is essentially all the same. Just like a spoken language, you have to understand the concepts of communicating effectively with other people and concepts such as I/you/us/them, adjectives, adverbs — only the sounds your mouth makes changes. Programming is very much the same way: same concepts for the most part but the language changes. With that semi-naive belief in hand, I bravely started Googling and reading MSDN.
[Read more…] about C#, WSDL, PowerShell cmdlets — Oh my!