haliphax

I found a trick for loading ASP.NET connectionString elements from configuration files for use in PowerShell scripts, and I figured I would share it with the class. They are, as should have been obvious to me much sooner, simply XML nodes in an XML document. This comes in pretty handy when you have scripts that you run against one or more databases that you want to use in a development environment (you must keep in mind that this method will not work with encrypted configuration files).

$conf = [XML](Get-Content 'App_Config/ConnectionStrings.config')
$constr = $conf.SelectSingleNode('connectionStrings/add[@name="MyConnectionString"]').connectionString
$con = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection($constr)
# etc.