I am really enjoying Powershell. The ISE is much more useful than I thought and flipping from the shell to notepad is really slick (although I still had to install gVim). The cmdlets are slicker than I originally gave them credit for. The default is to list all of the parameters/attributes of the cmdlet I've been experimenting and you can almost always leave them off when there's just one or two parameters. e.g.
PS > Get-History | Foreach-Object { $_.CommandLine } > c:\temp\
script.ps1
For the exact same results - try the much easier to remember...
PS > get-history > history.txt
The above works just like you would expect.
I found quite a few other examples that were obviously simplified. It's a pretty interesting scripting language. By adding the .Net accessibility, it is as if you have blended Bash and Ruby and some special Windows references thrown in to boot. I like it. It looks to be very powerful and handy. One of the main reasons I didn't like administering Windows is the lack of good sysadmin scripting tools and a poor command line shell. Powershell fixes that. Much is familiar too since it uses many Bash commands.
So, I've spent the day patching and armoring my Windows 7 running under OpenBox. I really like Windows 7 (which is probably why they are coming out with a Windows 8 so soon.)
With the vastly improved Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2 and Powershell - all in 64 bit - looks like it's going to be a less painful transition that I had thought. I'm actually really looking forward to it now.
