moomalade

I’ve been following the Windows PowerShell and the PowerShell team blog on and off for some time. It was released not too long after Vista but I never really go round to checking it out properly until this afternoon. I have been looking for some inspiration on how we can bring together some of our disparate asset processing tools under one roof. I want to make them more flexible and therefore easier to move from project to project.

Windows PowerShell is a domain specific tools designed to make administration faster, easier and more flexible. Windows administration has always taken a different approach to unix administration, preferring UI over the command line. The PowerShell looks like it’s trying to address that.

The getting started guide (included in the install package) is very good. It’s easy to dive straight in as there is a ton of user feedback. You can get help using the unix-like ‘man’ or ‘help’ commands. Common commands like ‘cd’, ‘ls’, and ‘dir’ are automatically aliased to ’set-location’ and ‘get-childitem’. The biggest give away that you’re not in cmd32.exe land anymore is that either unix-style / or dos-style \ path separators can be used and scripts must be executed unix-style with a qualified path (./myscript).

The whole thing is based on .NET. All command, and data piping, is done through .NET objects. Pretty funky stuff and well worth a look.