Learning for the sake of making my head explode…

I’m already busy enough at work – but there is always something to learn… always.  I have a really long list of stuff that I want to learn – but I don’t get to chip away at it like I used to – because of learning stuff for work…

So, this week, I’ve added a few new bits to my bucket (in terms of trial by fire) so lets see:

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) – now I can do some pretty spectacular imports into SQL Server – but it can’t be easy, no.  There are differences between the SSIS functionality that you get in SQL Server Standard and Developer/Enterprise Editions – very simple stuff like running the Script Task… that doesn’t seem to work in Standard that works fine in Developer – of course I don’t find out about that until we are deploying it to the staging server to test.  Back to the Drawing board…

SQL Reporting Services – there is a doozie and I’m not even working on the actual REPORTS – just trying to get the security working between the web front-end (which works) and another web-frontend that is using the Reporting Web Services (which doesn’t work) – yea, fun that.

Now a few for me…

PHP & Drupal – Ever since I signed up to Twitter, a friend of mine that I went to high school with and follow (Hey, @shrop !) has been talking a lot about Drupal – hence the reason that I rebuilt all my sites using it, just to see if it would meet my needs – and I’m impressed so far… but I have a LOT to learn.  Guess I should pester Mark more about it when I get stuck… ;-)

PowerShell – I’m sure this is a good idea, really, but it is one ugly idea. 

Here’s an example of something that goes through a list of servers and gets the drive space for each drive and prints it out to the console. 

  1: foreach ($target in $servers){
  2: 
  3:   $creds = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential "diiadmin", $pass
  4: 
  5: 
  6:   write-host "Checking $target..."
  7: 
  8:   $obj = (gwmi -query "select * from win32_logicaldisk where Size > 1" -computername $target -cred $creds )
  9: 
 10:   foreach ($disk in $obj) {
 11:     $freespace = ($disk.freespace / 1GB)
 12:     $totalspace = ($disk.Size / 1GB)
 13:     $freepercent = (($freespace / $totalspace)*100)
 14:     if ($freepercent -lt "15") 
 15:     {
 16:       
 17:       write-host "Drive" ($disk.deviceid) "has" ($disk.freespace / 1GB).ToString("n") "GB Free of" ($disk.Size / 1GB).ToString("n") "GB." $freepercent.ToString("n") "% Free." -foregroundcolor red
 18:     }
 19:     else 
 20:     {
 21:       write-host "Drive" ($disk.deviceid) "has" ($disk.freespace / 1GB).ToString("n") "GB Free of" ($disk.Size / 1GB).ToString("n") "GB." $freepercent.ToString("n") "% Free." -foregroundcolor green
 22:     }
 23:   }
 24: }

I feel like I’m going back to the first day in first grade when I opened the book and saw addition for the first time.  I’ve felt the same feeling a few other times  -- but looking at code and structure like this makes me think that I should just stick with C#, WinForms and a “Big Ass Button” app to get what I need…