- What Is PowerShell?
- What's New with PowerShell v2?
- Great PowerShell Resources Online
What's New with PowerShell v2?
Most of these features are "admin"-oriented and don't apply to users, but we would be remiss if we didn't mention some of the great new features in PowerShell v2 that exist on your Windows 7 desktops.
These include the following:
- New and Improved Cmdlets. About 240 new cmdlets. Some of these cmdlets relate to the following subjects: Remoting, Converting Types, Event Viewer and ETW Logs, Script Internalization, Modules, Transactions, Debugging, Eventing, Background Jobs, WMI, Computer, and more.
- PowerShell Remoting. Using WS-Management, you can now use cmdlets and scripting on remote systems (or multiple systems).
- Transactions. Allows transacted operations, which is exciting only to those who understand that this includes rollback ability. Currently the PowerShell Registry provider supports transactions (and by extension rollbacks).
- Modules. Script developers and admins can create modules that contain scripts and can be executed in self-contained restricted runspace.
- Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE). This is actually an option you can choose under Start | All Programs | Accessories | Windows PowerShell ISE and it includes a GUI PowerShell host with a tabbed UI for up to eight unicode-enabled consoles. For an explanation of unicode versus non-unicode encoding, see this short blog entry by John D. Cook: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/08/25/powershell-output-redirection-unicode-or-ascii/.
There are tons of other features in v2, such as Background Jobs, ScriptCmdlets, SteppablePipelines, Data Language, Script Debugging, Eventing, Network File Transfer, New Operators, Exception Handling with Try-Catch-Finally, Nestable Here-Strings, Block Comments, and last but not least, New APIs.