[BBLISA] sender-specific addresses

[Edward Ned Harvey (bblisa4)]

> From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On
> Behalf Of Tom Metro
> 
> So are you parsing HTML, or does Microsoft provide a supported API?

Oh - Got it.  I wouldn't call it an API, but MS does provide an interface.  Powershell.  A lot of people are not well familiar with powershell, so I'll describe it a little here ...

<background info>
It's an incredibly powerful abomination.  ;-)   If you've done any sort of shell or scripting or any other kind of language or command prompt on any other system (including windows) then all of your past experience is an inhibition to understanding powershell.  Which is why I call it an abomination.  But once you get past all that, (probably because some requirement at work has committed you to using it whether you like it or not) you start digging into it, and discover it's insanely powerful.

It uses a C#-like syntax, and natively supports .Net data objects.  So for example in shell scripting, you'll have some command that pipes to another command, and the interface between the two is a serial text stream.  In powershell, you have a command (for example, Get-ADUser, which returns .Net objects representing users in active directory) and pipe them into another command (such as Set-ADUser, which allows you to modify user objects) and the interface between the two is passing the actual class instances, data structures, not just serial text.  All in all, that's probably the one best feature.  Completely eliminates the need for things like sed and awk and other string parsing stuff, which often fails.  Natively supported by the shell, you have object oriented access to read/modify/filter/parse components of the data structure objects.  Plus, you can do stuff like try {} catch {}, and foreach ( $User in Get-ADUser ) { Set-ADUser -Identity $User.DistinguishedName -PasswordNeverExpires $false } ...   etc.   Very powerful, with lots of drawbacks.  A complete stark deviation from any other skills you've ever learned, with absolutely no cross platform compatibility.  Very windows exclusive.

There is at least one project out there, aiming to implement open source powershell on mono.  Mono can handle it, but the oss powershell project is extremely limited and not very functional yet.

</background info>

So all in all, what I do is this:

In my phone, I have an app, which lets me select a new alias.  When I click "submit," the app posts that info to a https URL, which is handled by my Win7 box in the basement.  The win7 box uses powershell to update info at office365, and when it's done, it sends me a test email, which also serves as a notification (I receive the email on my phone) that the new alias creation has completed, and is ready for use.

If there were an open source powershell, I'd love to use it.  Or something like a restful api, I'd also love to use that.  But no.  Not that I'm aware of.


> So it'd be pretty decent, had they not arbitrarily crippled t.

They might have a technical limitation that just *appears* to be arbitrary...    ;-)