Converting C# into PowerShell
In recent years Redgate's reflector has been getting bad press from the .Net development community. Mainly because they started charging (not much) for the product. So I had taken the communities advice and used the free equivalent Telerik's Just Decompile. However what I didn't realise is that v7 of Reflector has some really useful free "Goodies" available!
Such as the ability to reflect one language into another and the ability to extend this out to accommodate languages of your choice. The one I used was the PowerShell Language addin from codeplex.
Although PowerShell is not strictly a compiled language, this feature still has its uses. Namely that you can code in C# and use the speed of intellisense and the power of the CLR type safety. Then you can decompile the static methods that you've built into PowerShell. It gives you the basic syntax, then you may need to tweak it slightly for optimization purposes.
I thought that this is a great way to firstly familiarise yourself with the syntax of a language you are unfamiliar to, and also to increase your productivity as everyone has a favourite IDE and language type.
So all in all I think the $35 that Redgate charges could well be worth it.