One of my fellow Exchange MVP buddies, Bharat (sounds like “Bart”) Suneja is talking about the release of Windows PowerShell 2.0 CTP! Now, before you get overly excited, that CTP acronym stands for Community Technology Preview which is just a fancy name for Beta which is just a pretty name for Broken. So while you should definitely not go buck wild and install this on a production system, kudos to PowerShell team for getting the stuff out into developers hands especially given that the new release supports:
Remoting!!! Jim Harrison and I were talking about this very feature at this years TechEd, and the limitation that seemed almost crippling. Remoting gives you the ability to manage remote systems, execute cmdlets on remote servers which is important because..
You can now write your own cmdlets in PowerShell instead of having to compile .NET code. That in turn is important because:
PowerShell 2.0 comes with a GUI (of sorts) so you can do cool stuff like multiple shells, highlight and run only select pieces of the code..
Now, you do need .NET 3.0 but the boldfaced stuff up threre ought to give you more than enough reason to go get it. If you are new to PowerShell try get-help, if you’re experienced you’ve GOT to check out remoting: get-help About_Remoting
Sorry for the inane fanboyism about this but this level of flexibility and automation is what the PowerShell is all about and it allows organizations that rely on these servers to save a ton of time. It’s really a two-fold benefit. We spend a lot of time automating the documenting our processes in PowerShell since we have gone to Exchange 2007 and now Server 2008 because it enables us to give higher level administrative functions to the jr admins and not worry about them breaking anything. This shrinks our training requirements, makes sure everything is done according to our process (after all, humans make a lot more mistakes than computers).
So go, check it out. If you’re a sysadmin and you’re not yet knees deep in PowerShell I hope you’re working for the government cause you’re becoming obsolete more rapidly than the computer you’re reading this blog on. Go, get your dev on!
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