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ASP.NET Programming Using Windows PowerShell

Posted by Abel Avram on Jul 22, 2008 06:01 AM

Community: .NET
Topics: Scripting
Tags: ASP.NET ,; PowerShell

In an attempt to fill in an existing gap, NSoftware has made available a power shell toy, named PowerShellASP, which allows ASP.NET programmers to access the functionality of Windows PowerShell from inside ASP pages.

According to the authors, PowerShellASP is described as following:

PowerShellASP is an ASP-like template language for Web Applications; templates contain a mixture of markup (HTML, XML or whatever you want to generate) and inline PowerShell code. At runtime, templates/pages are fully translated to PowerShell code and executed as a single unit inside a PowerShell pipeline, with the results sent to the client browser.

PowerShellASP runs off the ASP.NET platform, implemented as a custom IHttpHandler mapped to *.ps1x files. Because of this, you can mix PowerShellASP pages alongside any ASP.NET application. This provides a great way to leverage PowerShellASP inside your existing applications as needed or you can create complete applications from scratch based only on *.ps1x pages.

In PowerShellASP, the usual Hello World example looks like this:

<html>
   <body> 
      <hl>Hello <%= $request['name'] %>!</hl> 
   </body> 
</html>

A page which displays the running processes on the machine looks like this:

 <html> 
  <body> 
    <table> 
      <tr><td>ID</td>><td>Name</td></tr> 
      <% get-process | %{ %>  
        <tr> 
          <td><%=$_.ID%></td> 
          <td><%=$_.ProcessName%></td> 
        </tr> 
      <% } %>
    </table> 
  </body> 
</html>

The PowerShellASP can be downloaded free of charge under the PowerShellASP license.