PowerShell and its future

As has been stated in the past, I am currently learning PowerShell (I am new to scripting).  Unfortunately, the last month has been a bit busy for me and I haven’t been able to focus on PowerShell at all.  But I’m getting back into it now.  Upon getting back into it, I discovered a couple cool utilities as well as information about PowerShell’s future and figured I would share this information with you.

I was debating on purchasing AdminScriptEditor for its ability to create create PowerShell forms and because I’d like to have a good Form Builder.  Recently, Sapien Technologies, Inc. released a free tool called PrimalForms to do exactly this, create PowerShell Windows Forms.   They also have many other free tools such as WMIExplorer, Windows PowerShell Help Tool, and many more.  It’s only a matter of time before the next version of PrimalScript is out that’ll have some awesome features for PowerShell.

I also found some more information about PowerShell’s future and how it will relate to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.  Fortunately, Windows PowerShell will be installed and accessible by default in both.  This version of Windows PowerShell will be version 2 which will support many new features such as a graphical powershell window, the ability to do remoting, and much more.  You can read about what’s coming in version 2 here.  Information about PowerShell being installed by default on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 can be found here.

As many PowerShell people know, there was a lack of AD cmdlets in Server 2008.  The reason for this is Server 2008 development was too far along for cmdlets.  Fortunately, Quest provides QAD cmdlets to provide a lot of Active Directory Manamgent to alleviate the tediousness of connecting to ADSI to perform actions.  These QAD cmdlets can be located here.

So what will will Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 bring that makes having PowerShell version 2 so wonderful?  Well, having Powershell version 2 is only one thing.  There’s also a net total so far of 574 cmdlets added!  WOW!  This isn’t even including Providers.  The AD Management tool(s) are built on top of PowerShell and so are the remoting capabilities of Server Manager.  Dmitry posted a list of cmdlets here.

Microsoft is definitely moving towards a model that anything that can be done in the GUI can be done through the CLI.  And  PowerShell is a great scripting language which means you can easily use tools such as PrimalForms to create your own Windows GUI to run PowerShell cmdlets and display them into a GUI as you see fit.  You can read more about this here.