Finally! A scripting language that dummies can understand: Windows PowerShell

beth.patton — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:59:00 GMT

Hi All

So I have belatedly discovered something that Microsoft has recently released: Windows PowerShell.

So cool, this is a scripting language that you can use to manage your infrastructure with. Remember writing and debugging those monstrous wscripts? That was one thing that I tried hard to avoid while I wore my admin hat back in Server Girl days. The advantage of PowerShell is that it is very intuitive. For example, commands such as get-service, stop-process. So much better than net start, blah blah.

It has this really cool utility where you can test your script before you run it, called WhatIf. So if you are about to stop a service, it will show you what other services will be stopped/affected by that action.

And it has this cool ability to do graceful error handling, where if you are running a script, and one thing in it fails, the whole script doesn't fail.

AND you can still use it with your existing scripts.

Microsoft has put a lot of thought into this, you can tell, because even the laziest of admins (like me) can adopt it fast.

They have even used it for the exclusive management tool for Exchange 2007 (yep, you can wrap a GUI over the commandlets!).

So go check it out if you HATE to SCRIPT.

Here is the PowerShell site on Microsoft.com

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx

PowerGadgets website:

http://www.powergadgets.com/

PowerShell Download:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/download.mspx

PowerShell SDK:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms714469.aspx