Whilst producing the presentation for VMworld I created a hypnotic slide which showed every cmdlet in PowerCLI 4.1 in a word cloud type picture, this picture was then rotated and zoomed until the audience believed we had given them a fantastic session – well kind of anyway !

The word cloud i created for that slide was actually created using wordle.net, a website which you can use to create word clouds, each word must be entered on the first page of the site, if a word is entered more than once it will make it bigger than the rest, the more times the bigger the word will be.  Now I could have typed each and every cmdlet into the site and then got it to generate the image for me but where is the fun in that ?

So I created a simple function which you can pass multiple words and it will do it for us, please see below for the code and a short video of me creating a word cloud of all the PowerCLI 4.1 U1 cmdlets:

Just a bit of fun really but someone may find it useful !

Function Out-WordCloud ($Words) {
	$ie = New-Object -com InternetExplorer.Application
	$ie.visible=$true
	$ie.navigate('http://www.wordle.net/create')
	while($ie.ReadyState -ne 4) {start-sleep -m 100}
	$ie.document.getElementById("paste").value=$Words
	$go = $ie.Document.body.getElementsByTagName('BUTTON') | Where {$_.innertext -eq 'GO'}
	$go.click()
}

$Words = Get-Command -Module Vmware.VimAutomation.core | `
 Select -ExpandProperty Name | Out-String

Out-WordCloud $Words

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