As of today, there is one month left until the PowerShell Summit North America 2014. I tweeted something out last night and thought I would write a quick blog about it since I often find myself looking for a tweet months later when I can’t remember how I did something that I previously tweeted out.

This tweet used all 140 characters that twitter allows:

"There are $(($i=New-TimeSpan -End 2014-04-28T09:00-07).Days) days & $($i.Hours) hours left until the #PowerShell Summit North America 2014"

This portion of the command is assigned to a variable named $i (technically it’s assigned to a variable named “i”):

New-TimeSpan -End 2014-04-28T09:00-07

It determines the amount of time until 9am on April 28, 2014 in the GMT -7 timezone (the current timezone for Seattle) so you can run this command from any time zone and it will display accurate information.

Here I’ve assigned the value to the variable $i and displayed the value of the days property, all in one line:

At this point $i contains the following value:

$i

When you surround it by quotation marks you end up with a hot mess:

"($i=New-TimeSpan -End 2014-04-28T09:00-07).days"

Enclosing the command in dollar sign parenthesis resolves the issue:

"$(($i=New-TimeSpan -End 2014-04-28T09:00-07).days)"

Now you can use the $i variable on the same line to display the hours in addition to the days since you wouldn’t want to show up to the PowerShell Summit too many hours early:

Write-Output "There are $(($i=New-TimeSpan -End 2014-04-28T09:00-07).Days) days & $($i.Hours) hours left until the #PowerShell Summit North America 2014"

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