Please join the Madison chapter of The League of Professional
System Administrators (LOPSA) for our September talk and discussion:
When:
Thursday, September 11, 2008 pizza at 6:30 (pizza provided by TDS Telecom) talk at 7:00
Where:
TDS Telecom, City Center West
RM 2510 525 Junction Road Madison, WI 53717
[Park in the ramp in visitor stalls on the first level or on the top
floor. Enter the building near the front fountain in the North Tower,
which is opposite the Quizno's and not facing Junction Rd.]
Exploring PowerShell: Microsoft's New Command Line, Scripting, and Automation Technology
Steven Murawski, IT Specialist/Computer Forensic Analyst, City of Greenfield Police Department
PowerShell is an object oriented automation framework that surfaces as a
command line environment (as a replacement for CMD.EXE), a scripting
language (including some very nice flow control options), and automation
technology.
PowerShell is based on the .NET Framework and works with .NET
objects (for the most part) rather than the standard text processing
common to most shells. PowerShell borrows concepts from Bash, the Korn
Shell, Python, Perl, TCL, C#, and other languages, with a focus on making
task automation efficient for Windows admins. (Just a quick aside,
PowerShell is object oriented and this works well with the Windows model,
which is object based, where text and file based shells are probably more
efficient in the Linux/Unix framework, where everything is a file.) By
being based on the .NET Framework, its reach is almost limitless on the
Microsoft platform. PowerShell works well with WMI and COM, allowing easy
access to a wealth of existing technologies and acting as a "glue"
technology for bring .NET, WMI, and COM components. Also, by being built
on the .NET Framework, it is easy to embed PowerShell as a customizable
scripting engine in applications.
PowerShell is extremely easy to extend. New native commands (called
cmdlets) in PowerShell are as simple as writing a class in VB.NET or C#.
PowerShell exposes things like the registry as a provider (drive), and
custom providers can be created as well. PowerShell also has a very strong
community. There are a growing number of Codeplex open source projects
targeting PowerShell. There is an active blogging and podcasting
community, and there are a number of product vendors supplying both free
and for cost software. A number of these vendors have partnered with the
more active members of the community to provide PowerShellCommunity.org,
with has blogs, forums, and a script repository. #powershell on
irc.freenode.net is also very active and a great resource.
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