Scripting: PowerShell Released

If you haven’t heard yet, PowerShell 1.0 was released yesterday (and yes, the downloads work now). As the name might lead you to believe, it's a new more powerful shell - or command-prompt - and a scripting environment for Windows, built on top of the .NET CLR and the .NET framework.

I'm starting to work though the getting started document, but already it looks and feels a bit like a bash shell. You can use cmdlets to do work, like "get-service", and then pipe the output though another cmdlet, like so:

"get-service findstr "Task"" (my pipe character keeps disappearing which I'm sure is because I'm doing something wrong with quoting in HTML, but there should be a pipe character "" between service and findstr).

Which would gather the services on your local box, and filter to display a line containing "Task". As I said, I'm just getting started. But from most accounts this is the future of scripting on the Windows platform, and Exchange 2007 will rely on it for doing work.

Also - The Script Center did a series of webcasts last week on PowerShell.