Mini Powershell Project – Extract individual pricing information for Action Pack from all Language Codes

After reading a post on Reddit about there being different prices for the Action Pack for different languages, I decided to whip up a Powershell script that looped through all the language identifiers and extracted the bit of text I needed from each page. It’s probably possible to extract the currency, but given different languages etc I didn’t think it was worth the hassle. You can see the script I used below and the results right at the bottom. I thought this was a fun little project and a good example of how you can use Powershell to solve day to day curiosities! To work this you will need to download and extract the HtmlAgilityPack DLL from https://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/ and update the import-module dll path; if you get an error importing it, ensure you have unblocked the DLL and relaunched Powershell. If I was going to change this, I’d output the display name of the language as opposed to the code.

$languageCodes = [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::GetCultures([System.Globalization.CultureTypes]::SpecificCultures)

function Get-PriceData
{
Import-Module "C:\PowershellDevScripts\HtmlAgilityPack.dll" # Replace with your .dll path
$url = 'https://partner.microsoft.com/'+ $args[0] + '/membership/action-pack'
$xpath = ‘//*[@id="main-content"]/div[2]/div/div/div/p[1]/text()[2]';
$doc = New-Object HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument
$doc.LoadHtml((iwr $url).RawContent);
$doc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode($xpath).InnerText;
}

$finalResults = @{}
foreach ($language in $languageCodes.name)
{
Write-Host $language
$result = ""
$result = Get-PriceData $language
if ($result)
{
$finalResults.Add("$language", "$result")
}

Write-Host $result
start-sleep -Milliseconds 500
}

If you want a HTML version of below:

MSDN Action Pack Comparison