[sjy]

I’ve been solving this problem with PowerShell for the last year or so. It’s usually available on locked-down corporate Windows boxes, and you can use the entire .NET Framework, as well as third-party .NET libraries, without admin rights. I’m using it with System.Data.SQLite to build a WPF application at the moment, which will hopefully replace a whole bunch of messy and hard-to-maintain Excel sheets and Access databases.

[eggy]

I love PowerShell for this reason. I had a 100 CSV files, and I needed the first two rows removed to put them into a signal viewing app, and it took only a few lines of PowerShell to do this on my corporate machine. I would normally do this in another PL, but strangely PowerShell's solution further pushed me to look into it for other uses on that machine. I wish there were a good book for this, since I actually prefer that than just Googling quick solutions when trying to actually learn something.

[sjy]

Yep, I could have learned much faster with a good book. Most PS tutorials are targeted at sysadmins with minimal programming experience. I would have preferred something that assumed programming experience and focused on what makes PS different from other scripting languages.

[rejschaap]

I work in a Microsoft shop, but I always have a bash shell running. It prevents me from really diving into PowerShell. I will end up running a quick sed '2,3d' on the csv files and move on with my life.

[eggy]

I have PowerShell on my local company machine, and without Admin priveleges I can't even sideload bash through a Git install. We're not a software company, so requesting Git is also out of the standard operational procedures as a user. IT knows my coding background (since 1978), but they can't change policy.