Few Things About Windows Powershell

Introduction

Windows Powershell 1.0 creates a useful task-based command-line scripting shell for performing some of the more important tasks which are needed on a server. In fact, Windows Powershell was originally available with Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008. It is being shipped with this server operating system and with Windows 7.0 as an optional beta product.

Features

PowerShell 1.0 integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and gives the task of administration a boost by supplying an environment to perform these tasks by the execution of "commandlets," scripts which combine commandlets with imperative logic, a set of executables and via regular .NET classes.

Windows PowerShell 1.0 providers give access to data in sections of the data store such as the system registry and the file system. And other Microsoft applications like Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and MS Exchange Server 2007 are integrated by the commandlets in Windows PowerShell.

And Windows PowerShell 1.0 has a comprehensive command-line console-based help system (which is accessed in much the same way as a man-page in a UNIX shell.)

The difference between the regular Command.com and CMD.exe in traditional MS-DOS and Windows environments and the new shell provided by Windows PowerShell is that it is capable of automating a full range of core admin tasks. It originally came out as Monad in 2003 and, since then, has gone through several enhancements and improvements until, in April 2006, Microsoft renamed Monad to Windows PowerShell and utilize Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to increase the functionality to a level not seen before in a Windows command interpreter, because it has the added functions embedded in .Net.

To be specific, the specific functions which are run as commands in PowerShell are native in the PowerShell stack and take the form of naming convention. An example of this would be BeginProcessing or EndProcessing. Also included are the complex operations involved in a scripting language which will combine a branch as well, such as if-then-else or while-wend. PowerShell also provides arrays and associative arrays, evaluates arithmetic expressions on the command-line, and parses common abbreviations like KB, MB and GB.

Microsoft are working on a future version of PowerShell, Version 2.0 and probably it got success to it now.