stuart test blog

The PowerShell team have just released the first publicly available CTP of PowerShell 2.0. This hasn’t even reached beta stage yet, so there is bound to be lots of bugs and no doubt the product will change  a lot prior to release.

Lots of new features, but the stand-out ones for me are:

• Remote scripting – now you can run PowerShell scripts against remote computers, as long as they also have PowerShell installed.
• Background jobs – you can run a PowerShell script and it will run in the background. This means that your cursor will return to the next line in the console and you can continue with other tasks. You can then query the progress of the background job at any time with another command.
• Script cmdlets – cmdlets can be created using PowerShell scripts whereas in the current version you need to compile them as managed code, for example C# or VB.Net.
• PowerShell GUI – there’s an early preview of a graphical PowerShell front end that gives you colour-coding syntax, as well as multiple tabs with multiple shells (up to eight.)

There’s also mention of improved hosting APIs but I’m not sure if that just applies to compiled applications being built on top of PowerShell. I’d like to be able to run PowerShell in HTAs in the same way that VBScript can currently be run.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently as to how PowerShell can be implemented in production, and some of these features will definitely make it more relevant – especially the ability to run PowerShell scripts against remote computers.