Tuesday, November 06, 2007

PowerShell V2 - New Features!!

There's a bunch of new features in PowerShell V2 - although some will change and some of the things in the CTP may even  be dropped. That's the nature of CTPs! A good place to start is to read the release notes that describe the new features and show worked examples.

Here's my list of key new stuff in PowerShell V2:

  • Remoting - PowerShell now includes support for executing cmdlets and scripts on remote systems using WinRM. COOL!!!!
  • Background jobs - PowerShell V2 now has the concept of background jobs that you can spawn and monitor.
  • Script Cmdlets to enable you to write rich cmdlets in PowerShell. In PowerShell V1, you could write functions that sort of felt like cmdlets. With V2, you can now write fully fledged cmdlets using just script which is very cool!!!
  • Stepable pipelines - a neat feature to enable you to  control the execution of the pipeline.
  • Data Language - provides for better separation of scripts and data. Useful for internationalisation scenarios
  • Script debugging - there are improvements to debugging. Hooray
  • New operators and new internal variables - some new operators and new system variables have been added
  • New Cmdlets - the range of standard cmdlets has been expanded with 24 new cmdlets, including Out-GridView, Invoke-WMIMethod and Start-PSjob.
  • Additional APIs - as ever, more APIs for devs to play with.
  • A very early alpha release of a more GUI like PowerShell shell. A nice concept

This is a very nice set of improvement, and goes a long way towards making PowerShell the only choice for command line admin under Windows!

Along with the rest of the PowerShell bloggers, I'll be looking at these new features in upcoming blog articles. The next year or so (the lead up to the RTM) is going to be fun!!!

Sadly, there seems no improvement to the documentation of trap and throw. :-(

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