Windows Powershell is Here

The Achilles heel of Windows Server (apart from its inherent Microsoft-ish-ness) has always been its inability to script from the command prompt anywhere nearly as cleanly as any of the Unix-based alternatives have been capable of. To this end Microsoft has been quietly working on a soft of command prompt on steroids called Windows PowerShell. If Microsoft had just cloned the Unix environment it probably would have been a good enough solution for most system admins, but Microsoft decided to take it a bit further and then off into a different direction. Windows PowerShell greatly increases the number of commands available via the command prompt but it also creates interoperability between .NET objects through the command line. I know, at first that line confused the hell out of me too. Basically it means that the command line doesn't operate on data in the same way a Unix shell does. It operates on objects and then produces output based on the interaction of the objects. Think of it more like blackbox computing instead of unix's everything-is-visible meat-grinder approach. This in no possibly way means that Windows PowerShell is better than working in a Unix shell. I personally found it slightly counter intuitive to use. Having said that it is really bloody handy to finally have the ability to do scripting outside the Visual Basic realm in Windows. If you're a power user or tinker in office automation, its certainly worth checking out.

Linkage - Windows PowerShell 1.0 - Vista x32 / x64 - XP x32 / x64 - Server 2003 x32 / x64 - Site