14 DAY TRIAL // Concomitantly with signing off its next iterations of Windows client and server platforms, Microsoft also released to manufacturing PowerShell 2.0. On July 22nd, 2009, the Redmond company announced the official RTM for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Both operating systems include the latest version of PowerShell as a default component. In this regard, together with the two flavors of Windows 7, PowerShell 2.0 also went gold. As such, the software giant indicated that users of earlier releases of Windows would be able to soon leverage PowerShell 2.0 as well.
“Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have been released to manufacturing. Both of these products include Windows PowerShell 2.0 and its exciting new features, such as remoting, ISE, modules, advanced functions, enhanced WMI support, and a variety of new cmdlets, plus a ton of other features. We are proud of this release. We thank the PowerShell community, specially our MVPs, for helping us to make a great product,” revealed Osama Sajid, program manager.
Still, users of Windows Vista SP1/SP2, Windows XP Service Pack 3, and Windows Server 2008 will have to exercise a tad of patience before they will get PowerShell 2.0 RTM. “In the next few months, we will release a downlevel package for installing Windows PowerShell 2.0 on Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista-SP1 and Windows Server 2008,” Sajid added.
The latest development milestone of PowerShell 2.0 available for the precursors of Windows 7 is the third Community Technology Preview build released for download in December 2008. Microsoft did not provide a specific date when users of Vista and XP will be able to download the gold version of PowerShell 2.0 RTM. Developers and IT professionals that are also members of MSDN or TechNet will be able to start using PowerShell 2.0 RTM concomitantly with the gold release of Windows 7, which will become available to them on August 6th, 2009.
Windows PowerShell V2 Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3) is available for download here.