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.

Longhorn CLI: Monad shell (MSH)

More news on Longhorn! It sounds like the Monad Shell (MSH) is going to be replacing, or at least supplanting WMI for scripting administrative functions. It only makes sense to move to something based on the .NET framework, and from the looks of things MSH is going to be more on par with something akin to bash. While I recall hearing about Monad a while back, it’s good to hear that things are progressing on the CLI front.