Microsoft drops internal PowerShell tests on GitHub Microsoft has chucked some of its PowerShell team’s test code onto Github as part of an effort to open up its tests to the OSS community. The move gives PowerShell fans the chance to push the admin and automation framework using Microsoft’s own tools, in the comfort and safety of their own systems. And presumably it should …
"Yes and it would be possible for the good guys to see how the bad guys could bork it and therefore help to harden it"
Possibly. But, at the same time, Microsoft has turned rather deaf ears on the whole Windows 8/10 fiasco, and ignored the cries they didn't want to hear. So counting on Microsoft to actually listen to the advice from their customers is rather dicey.
No I'm not suggesting that opening the code makes it insecure.
What I was asking was,
Does the availability of the TEST suite possibly make the product being tested less secure.
If you can see in detail how something is tested then it is possibly easier to break the thing.
Consider the VW Emissions scandal. The test spec is commonly available so VW were able to detect that the vehicle was being tested and ... well you know the rest.
If it can be done for cars then can it be done for a tool like Powershell? (or any tool for that matter)
I think you owe me a fiver...
Bugger :)
And no, in this case it won't matter. These are the unit tests, not the automated or user tests. All they do is verify that various bits of code do what they were designed to do and nothing more.
Unit tests are useful for design, for code integrity and for regression testing. They're not any form of functional test.
Well if you ask me, why dream up another shell environment when several good ones exist on UNIX already?
Why?
If you have UNIX guys they could contribute or just run code on Windows. Windows admins could get snippets from the UNIX guys. Good Windows guys could write good scripts for UNIX servers too. I guess most decisions at Microsoft are made because they cannot see the forrest for the trees...
There's a philisofic difference between Powershell and *nix shells (eg bash).
Both shells tend to have lots of small programs that do one thing well, and to do a more complex task you'll use several programs and pass the output of one into another. The big difference is that *nix tends to pass the information as text, so if your program isn't outputting in the format you need, then it's time for some sed/awk fun. Powershell, instead, passes objects between programs ('cmdlets' in MS parlance), which means you don't need as much conversion to pass the output of one command to another.
There's also the added benefit that it's quite tightly integrated into modern Windows, especially in the Server OSs, so the modern admin can use the command line to administer Windows at least as easily as a Linux admin can.
There's an interesting talk by the guy who pushed for the inclusion of Powershell here, which explains the reasoning and philosophy behind Powershell better than I can.
tl/dr Powershell does some things in a more modern way to *nix shells which makes it more useful to Windows admins than a straight clone of bash would be.
it's a good thing you post as AC because your apparent inability to comprehend that point of the article along with your equally apparent preference for blind prejudice over actually trying anything new means nobody in the industry would ever hire you.
I know it's not actually real, you're trying to look cool for the linux trolls and you do that by posting insults to anything that's not *nix while failing to ever add any technical content of your own. Brownshirt mentality. You'll grow out of it. Hopefully.
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