Windows PowerShell
Windows PowerShell is a free download from Microsoft. It’s pretty cool stuff. (If PowerShell is good enough for MySpace, it may be good enough for YOU!)
Let’s start with an excerpt from an interview with Jeffrey Snover, Software Architect of PowerShell (previously known as Monad)
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Q: What do you consider the most exciting recent development in computing technology?
Snover: In all honesty – Monad. We are doing things that will make your head spin. The quantity and quality of the technical innovations is staggering.
When we show people what we are doing, you have to pass out drool buckets.
I’ve talked to hard core UNIX guys that start out absolutely hostile to what we are saying and then when they see what we are doing, they want to standardize their entire company on it.
[tease]
Windows PowerShell is a new command line shell and task-based scripting technology that provides information technology (IT) administrators comprehensive control and automation of system administration tasks, increasing administrator productivity.
Windows PowerShell includes numerous system administration utilities, consistent syntax and naming conventions, and improved navigation of common management data such as the registry, certificate store, or Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Windows PowerShell also includes an intuitive scripting language specifically designed for IT administration.
There’s an FAQ, and even a PowerShell blog.
Did I mention there’s also a PowerShell book?
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The author is Bruce Payette a founding member of the Windows PowerShell team, the author of the Windows PowerShell language interpreter, and one of key designers of the Windows PowerShell language. Bruce has been working on UNIX shell and utility tools for Windows for the past 15 years at companies like MKS and Softway, now part of Microsoft Services for Unix. Bruce holds a BASc from the University of Waterloo.
You can read chapter one FREE.
From the PowerShell blog, this tidbit:
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Today [November 14, 2006] at the keynote at ITForum in Barcelona, we announced the official release of Windows PowerShell 1.0!
For those of you unfamiliar with Windows PowerShell, it is a best of breed next-generation commandline shell designed from the ground up to be flexible and powerful while still remaining easy to use.
Many thanks go to our friends at MySpace.com for coming all the way to Barcelona to show how they’re using Windows PowerShell in production today for the mission critical task of maintaining and managing the second busiest website in the world.
Yeah, I know, we all love to hate Microsoft. But every now and then they do something elegant and powerful, like PowerShell.
Get over it.