New Solved: Anyone Doing Advent Of Code In Powershell? 2026

Posted on Dec 31

• Originally published at wp.me

TL;DR: Tackling Advent of Code in PowerShell presents challenges like verbose input parsing and performance bottlenecks for complex algorithms. Solutions involve leveraging idiomatic PowerShell’s pipeline and .NET integration, boosting speed with C# interop for critical sections, and orchestrating external, highly optimized utilities.

Tackling Advent of Code with PowerShell presents unique challenges, from intricate input parsing to optimizing performance for complex algorithms. This post explores effective strategies for IT professionals to solve AoC puzzles using idiomatic PowerShell, C# interop for speed, and orchestration of external utilities.

Advent of Code (AoC) is a fantastic way to sharpen your programming skills, and attempting it in PowerShell can highlight both the language’s strengths and its inherent limitations for specific types of problems. When using PowerShell for AoC, you might encounter symptoms like:

The most natural and often sufficient approach for many AoC problems is to lean into PowerShell’s strengths: its object-oriented pipeline, powerful cmdlets, and seamless .NET integration. This approach prioritizes readability and leveraging the tool’s core design principles.

Use PowerShell as it’s intended. This means chaining cmdlets, utilizing the pipeline for data flow, employing native string manipulation and regex, and making direct calls to .NET types when built-in cmdlets aren’t enough. For most day-to-day scripting tasks and many AoC problems, this is the most productive path.

Let’s consider a common AoC task: reading input, parsing numbers, and performing calculations.

Example: Summing Numbers from a Delimited Input File

Many puzzles involve grids. Representing them as an array of arrays or an array of character arrays is common.

When you need mutable lists or other specific collections, directly using .NET types is crucial.

Source: Dev.to