I haven’t posted anything in a while but it’s not because I’ve been idle.  I’ve been doing a massive amount of PowerShell and will be blogging some real cools stuff in the coming weeks.

For now, I’m offering a little tidbit I wrote yesterday for reading a file into a binary byte array.  It was necessary for Publishing RDL files in Sequel Server Reporting Services – more on that later too.

function read-filebytes($fileItem={Throw "fileItem is required for read-filebytes"})

{

  try {

    [system.io.stream]$stream = [system.io.File]::OpenRead($fileItem.fullname)

    try {

      [byte[]]$filebytes = New-Object byte[] $stream.length

      [void] $stream.Read($filebytes, 0, $stream.Length);

      $filebytes

    } -finally {

      $stream.Close();

    }

  } -catch {

    Write-Error "Error reading file $fileItem - $_"

    return

  }

}

I’m using the TryCatchFinally Cmdlet it’s really made error management much easier.

The real trick to this script is:

  [byte[]]$filebytes = New-Object byte[] $stream.length

This pre-allocates the memory for the Stream Read method.  Not a common technique in PowerShell.

Cash