PowerShellForGitHub–Adding Get-GitHubRelease

PowerShellForGitHub is an awesome powershell module for interacting with the GitHub API. It has a wide set of features that are already implemented and its supported by Microsoft(!!). You can also tell the amount of care the maintainer, Howard Wolosky, has put into it when you dig into the code and read through the inline documentation, contributing documentation and telemetry support(!!). BTW, if you ever need to create a PII transmittable string, check it out: Get-PiiSafeString.

One of the features I was looking for the other day was the ability to retrieve a list of releases for a repository. (I was building a script to monitor the dotnet/core releases; in order to build an ASP.NET Core Hosting Bundle auto-installer.)

I submitted a pull request of the update last week and was really impressed with all the automation in the pull request processing. The first thing that surprised me was the integrated msftclas bot (Microsoft Contribution License Agreements), which posted a legal agreement form that I (or the company I represent) consent to give Microsoft ownership of the code we contribute. It was soo smooth and easy to do.

Next was the meticulous level of comments and review notes on the pull request. If he made all those comments by hand, holy moly! That would be amazing and I would want to praise him for his patience and level of detail. Hopefully, some of the comments were stubbed out by a script/bot; which would be a really cool script to know about.

So, I’m gonna go through the comments and see if I can update this pull request.

• *facepalm* Wow, I really missed changing the name GitHubLabels.ps1 to GitHubReleases.ps1 in the .tests.ps1 file.
  
• White space in .tests.ps1: Ahhh … I can better see the white space formatting style now.
  
• Examples missing documentation: Hahaha! My mistake. It looks like I started writing them and got distracted.
  
• Telemetery: I loved the note:
  
  For these, I think it's less interesting to store the encrypted value of the input, but more so that the input was provided (simply in terms of tracking how a command is being used).
  
  Thank you for pointing that out! It makes complete sense.

In summary, a big Thank You to Howard Wolosky and the Microsoft team for making this module! It was a huge time saver and really informative on how to write Powershell code in a better way.