Weather WebService in Powershell

Did you know how easy it is to test a web service in Powershell? I think I can get used to this new tool.

Proof of concept

Here’s my script for checking the weather in powershell:

$uri = "http://www.webservicex.net/WeatherForecast.asmx?WSDL" 
$WeatherForecast = New-WebServiceProxy -uri $uri -UseDefaultCredential -namespace "WeatherForecast" 
$WeatherForecast.GetWeatherByZipCode(78247)
$WeatherForecast.GetWeatherByZipCode(78247).details

This publicly available web service returns the lat, lon of a zip! Sweet. I can find other uses for that.

The details object returns the forecast for today and the next 5 days.

Get the Methods

To reuse, substitute your web service’s WSDL URI and use something like the following to check for existing methods available:

$WeatherForecast | get-member -type method

Reference

I got inspiration and code pieces from StackOverflow.com, Technet’s New-WebServiceProxy reference and a blog post by Keith Hill.