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Microsoft PowerShell is awesome

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At work I've been playing with Windows PowerShell.  I could try to describe it, but Wikipedia has already done a better job:

Windows PowerShell, previously Microsoft Shell or MSH (codenamed Monad) is an extensible command line interface (CLI) shell and scripting language product developed by Microsoft. The product is based on object-oriented programming and the Microsoft .NET framework.

Windows PowerShell 1.0 is available for download from the Microsoft web site.

It blows my mind how cool it is.  Unfortunately it also, uhh, fries my brain because I don't know how to use it.  I'm a cmd.exe expert.  Seriously, I know way, way too much about writing CMD scripts, to the point where most people can't keep up.  I don't want this knowledge, and I see that PowerShell may give me freedom from the burden of the knowledge.

 

My biggest annoyance is that it's not universally available.  I want to be able to sit down at any machine and just start using PowerShell, not having to worry about installing it (and the .Net Framework) first.  I want to be able to offer .PS1 scripts for anyone to use, without them having to jump through the same hoops.

 

Too bad it missed the Vista train.  That means it'll be 10 years before it's everywhere.  We'll get there.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 12, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 12, 2007
    It is awsome to see MS embracing automation (at least towards its customers and not just internally.)  The only downside I see is that you are forced to play catch up to the BSD/*nix tools that are tried and true across the other OS's... reinventing grep, sed, find, awk, etc. is a lot of effort I would think.. the example shows URI:DownloadString, however; curl or wget are already available.  

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2007
    Yeah man... so cool... piping objects! The web site says they hope to have a Vista drop by 1/31, so I'm holding my breath, too.

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2007
    Kris: I'd summarize what you're saying as "PowerShell is a 1.0 product that is still a little rough around the edges, while bash & Co. have decades of refinement".  But the good news is that PS comes with a foundation that will enable it to go much further than those other tools, and it won't take decades.   Guess I'm a PowerShell fanboy. :-)

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2007
    Having come up with the initial idea of Windows PowerShell and then worked on it for a (really) long

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2008
    The comment has been removed