“Captain Literal”.NET

Windows PowerShell is an fantastic tool that will become part of my “used daily” toolkit. I came across Jeffrey Snover’s blog a couple of weeks ago and have really enjoyed reading it. I also recommend the 10 part series on managing Active Directory with powerShell on the /\/\o\/\/ PowerShelled blog, it is very insightful but I felt that I need something more basic to learn the product from the ground up.

Enter Jeffrey’s recently published presentation (from tech-Ed 2006) on PowerShell – this guy makes an hour and 15 minutes of the command line amusing to watch and very informative. I’d prescribe it to all IT Pros as this is going to be your tool of choice in the future.

A couple of things stand out from the presentation. One is that all other scripting mechanism shipped with windows are “feature complete” and two is that in Exchange 2007 (E 12), the MMC admin interface calls PowerShell to perform functions.

The implications of the first one are massive, cscript/wscript/WSH will not be extended in the future and CMD will not get any more features added! PowerShell will be the ONLY scripting tool for admin scripting and will I imagine replace CMD. This is a big shift and if you don’t embrace PowerShell in the Longhorn Server timeframe, you’ll find yourself without any scripting tools and without any community support!

The second part (E 12 using PowerShell for all admin) is intriguing from the point of view of a developer (like me), He only talked about it briefly, but I got the impression that all the MMC snap-in for E12 does is call PowerShell – this means that anything you can do in the GUI, you can do from the console. I want to implement this in my applications!

Better still, the E 12 GUI will tell you the PowerShell command to achieve what you’re trying to do, rather like SQL 2005 having a Script button whenever you do something – how cool is that? This is something I can take advantage of in applications and try to get the ops guys to use PowerShell in favour of the GUI in the future.

Right now, Windows PowerShell is in Release Candidate and I imagine that it’ll ship when Vista does, maybe I should raise the chage to get it deployed all over the companies servers now and see if it gets approved

Filed under: PowerShell