Today, I was so surprised that I got an empty string when I call the serialize method on a jQuery wrapped form.
The html is written in Haml:

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%form#graph-option.horizontal-form
	%fieldset
		%label{ :for=>'start-date'} Start Date
		%select#start-date
		%label{ :for=>'end-date'} End Date
		%select#end-date
		%button#submit-option.btn.large-btn

And the script is written in coffee-script:

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$ ->
	$('#submit-option').click ->
		option = $('#graph-option').serialize()
		$.post '/dashboard/graph', option, (data) ->
			renderCharts data

When I execute the script, I got 500 error. And the reason is that the option is empty.
I believe this must be caused by a super silly mistake, so I try to call serialize methods on Twitter Bootstrap website, and I still got empty string!!!!

After half an hour debugging, I just realize that I forgot to assign the name to all the input elements. And according to html specification, the browser uses the name of the elements to identify whom the value belongs to.
So when the name is omitted, the serailizeArray method in jQuery returns an empty array, as a result, the serialize method returns empty string.

According to my experience, it is easy to identify this problem, if the html is in html-like format, such as erb. But it is really hard to identify this issue if the page is written in haml, because in haml, id is used much more often.
To fix this problem, we need to specify the name explicitly for each form element.

Here is the fixed haml code:

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%form#graph-option.horizontal-form
	%fieldset
		%label{ :for=>'start-date'} Start Date
		%select#start-date{ :name=>'start-date' }
		%label{ :for=>'end-date'} End Date
		%select#end-date{ :name=>'end-date' }
		%button#submit-option.btn.large-btn

Powershell and .net fx provides a dozen of approaches to manipulate hash-object. And it is really easy and convenient to initialize hash-object with values from environment variables, registry or cli arguments.
And Hash-Object can be accessed and built into hierarchy easily, so to use powershell hash-object as deploy configuration is really powerful and convenient.

But in our system, the application uses the ini-like key-value pair plain text as the initial configuration file. So our deploy script need the ability to serialize and deserialize hash-object to and from ini-like config.

So I composed this piece of script.