Scripting

I spent a week with PowerShell last May, and watched all the Technet Webcasts in November. My impression: I love it!

I have a slightly unusual use for it: For years, I've been using JPSoft's Take Command (successor to 4DOS) as my primary shell, so I can stay at a command prompt typing and avoid the GUI. (Trackball/wrist incompatibilities.) I still like Take Command, but I do have to pay for copies at home and at work, and new versions every year. I also cannot license Take Command for all college computers, so I can't "take it with me" when I've written a useful script.

Enter PowerShell: It can do everything Take Command does interactively, plus I can use its scripts on many computers for free. It took me about a dozen hours in May to figure out a function to replace Take Command's SELECT command: Present a list of files in a directory and let the user pick some, using the standard File Open dialog box. I've created functions and .txt files to replace all my Take Command aliases in PowerShell. I even found a hack to make PowerShell work on Windows 2000, which it's not supposed to do.

In short, I think PowerShell is well worth any administrator's time. Sande

I've had a little chance to play with this myself now and i've got a bit of a mixed reaction to it really.

On the plus side i love the fact that it's object orientated and that so many lines written in vbscript can now be done with a single line in Powershell.

On the downside though.... Why have they gone from a vb style language to a c# style language, why not move to a vb.net style language instead. Now we have to learn yet another language which is even harder if you have no grasp of c languages to start with,

Another downside is that it implements digital certificates which sounds like a great thing but where is the documentation on this? I've found several sites with the same command lines but none of them explain them properly if you want to use an existing certificate. What happens when the certificate runs out, all your scripts around your organisation will stop running !?!?!

Also how lame is the security on this thing? They improve the security by not associating the wp1 with powershell and associating it with notepad instead. That's going to be hard to get around isn't it?!!?

Although this thread is pretty old, there might be still some sort of interest in this topic. PowerShell v2 is about to be finished and there is still no native support for PowerShell custom actions.

However, I needed a way of configuring IIS from within an MSI setup using custom actions and PowerShell.

Since this can be easily done (even by using managed code), I decided to post some basic information and hints on my blogs of how to do it with less than 20 lines of code. ;-)

Read it here.