Longhorn:: 10 Reasons to look at Windows Longhorn Part 2: PowerShell

PowerShell is our newest and coolest command line shell and scripting language. It is built on the .Net Framework and introduces features that enable command-line users and script writers to leverage the power of that foundation. It introduces a number of powerful new concepts, but it enables you to reuse both the knowledge you have gained and the scripts you have created within the Windows Command Prompt and Windows Script Host environments.

 

There are over 130 standard commandlets ("cmdlets") for completing common system administration tasks such as working with the registry. Exchange 2007 was the first team that worked with PowerShell and created over 350 cmdlets to manage an Exchange 2007 environment. Other products like Operations Manager 2007, Virtual Machine Manager are also leveraging the power of PowerShell. PowerShell is a verb-noun based scripting language for example the help command is Get-Help.

 

With Vista now released we also introduced 13 new WMI providers like Bitlocker, TPM, IIS7, .... we are also able to query those WMI providers trough PowerShell.

Lot's of customers ask us questions like do I have to learn .Net, I have a set of tools do I need to rewrite them? ...

Well the good news is that you don't need to learn .Net and you can still use your existing tools. It's really easy to start with PowerShell you can learn on your own pace and there is online help available. What I personally do like about this shell is that it's very easy to try a script out, you can actually execute line by line and then put it in a script. This was rather difficult with for example VBScript where you had to debug the script.

It's also easy to access your files and even registry from within the shell - "cd HKCU". With this simple command you just have access to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive in the registry.

There are some third parties that leverages the power of Powershell:

NetCmdlets

PowerGadgets ( tutorial for IT Pro's )

And I am sure that there are many other tools available today.

 

Community Resources:

Channel 9 tag: https://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Monad

Team blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell/O

Mark van Orsouw’s blog: https://thepowershellguy.com

Arul Kumaravel's Blog:https://blogs.msdn.com/arulk

Lee Holmes' Blog:https://www.leeholmes.com/blog

Abhishek Agrawal’s Blog:https://abhishek225.spaces.msn.com/PersonalSpace.aspx

MshAnalyzer tool:https://www.karlprosser.com/coder/?cat=8

I can't share a lot of information with you about how PowerShell and Longhorn server will work together but as soon as I know I will post it onto this blog.

By the way there are two PowerShell sessions planned during the Dev & IT Pro Days 2007 - Bruce Payette will deliver them.

 

10 Reasons to look at Windows Longhorn Part 1: Server Management Improvements

The next blogpost I will talk about Internet Information Server 7.0 and what benefits the IT Professional will get out of this new version.

Technorati tags: Longhorn, Dev & IT Pro days, Bruce Payette, PowerShell