Developing on Staxmanade

It's Markdown, no, PowerShell. Wait its Markdown formatted PowerShell.

I created an introductory presentation on PowerShell a while back and posted it on my GitHub. I first gave the presentation at the NNSDG and decided to also submit it as a talk to the Boise Code Camp this year. (Looks like I'll be going – track me down @staxmanade if you’d like to say hello)

I’ve become quite a fan of Markdown lately and thought, “what if this not only looked like PowerShell, but looked even better as Markdown…?”

After experimenting a little, I found that it actually works quite well.

For example:

PowerShell (Markdown)

## String Interpolation

### Single quotes `don't` interpolate
    'Hello $groupName' 
    
### Double quotes `DO` interpolate
    "Hello $groupName"
        
    
### Wrap `$(...)` around expression within an string
    "groupName variable is of type: $($groupName.GetType().FullName)"
    "2 + 1564 = $(2 + 1564)"
    "Current DateTime is = $(get-date)"
    "Current DateTime is = $([System.DateTime]::Now)"

    
### Escape characters with the ` (back-tick)
    "Escape a quotation `"This is quoted`"."

 

Formatted Markdown

image

 

One issue I have is the way GitHub/markdown formats extra whitespace (it doesn’t). So I’ve worked around that so that I can get the vertical whitespace that I need in the Markdown version by placing a link to a spacer image: 

![vertical space](http://is.gd/VertSpace)

This isn’t ideal because my PowerShell is littered with this snippet, but something that can easily be search/replaced before using the raw version as a PowerShell script.

I also think that you could potentially do this with many different programming languages. (At least ones that don’t depend on whitespace and have a form of block comments)

Nifty eh?

Happy PowerDowning or MarkShelling!