As a free download

Nov 14, 2006 14:54 GMT  ·  By

Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft broke the news about the official release of PowerShell 1.0 at the Microsoft IT Forum conference in Barcelona, Spain. "Windows PowerShell, it is a best of breed next-generation command-line shell designed from the ground up to be flexible and powerful while still remaining easy to use," stated Leonard Chung, Jeffrey Snover, and Arul Kumaravel on behalf of the PowerShell Team.

Available as a free download from Microsoft, PowerShell 1.0 is a command-line and scripting language created to enhance the manageability of Windows and applications running on the Windows operating system. "Think of it as an integrated version of the Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe) and VBScript that is easy to use and will allow you to automate and control system administration tasks," stated Alex Heaton, Windows Vista Security Engineer at Microsoft.

"The benefit of adopting Windows PowerShell is that ad-hoc tasks that used to take upwards of 10 minutes can now run in five seconds or less, all the while providing better reporting, greatly increased accuracy and much less manual labor," said Allen Huff, vice president of engineering at MySpace. "MySpace has also already begun to test production loads on Windows Server 'Longhorn.' We've already seen a significant reduction in CPU usage and an increase in requests per second from the new IIS 7 pipeline."

PowerShell 1.0 delivers built-in Cmdlets for Windows managements, a command line to display wildcards and working objects and a "Whatif" feature to test the results of a command without executing it. Additionally, PowerShell 1.0 enables users to take transcripts of their commands and make Windows talk or access Media Player 11. PowerShell can also be used as a command line storage calculator or as a calendar calculator or even to configure User Account Control.