Ah… CTP2… I’ve been waiting for it since hearing that it was slowing but surely making its way into the public arena. Well, per Jeffrey’s posting early today, CTP2 will be formerly shown to the public at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). While he posted some CTP2 related information from the ReadMe earlier this week. The wording in his post from today, infers that Bruce and Jeffrey are going to be showing CTP2 “stuff” that is geared at making automation scripts more productive:
“Those of you that are going to MMS are probably big WMI users. If you are, then you DEFINATELY want to come to my What’s New In PowerShell V2 talk on Wed and be sure to bring your drool buckets. We’ve been listening to you. We’ve also been drilling into the sort of scripts that you write and we think they stink. I’m actually completely serious. I’m not throwing a rock at YOU, I’m throwing it at US. We’ve given you crummy tools and abstractions so the level of crap you have to deal with just to get your job done is completely insane. I talked to one team whose WMI scripts took so long to run, that they started the second pass of the script before the first pass was done! UNACCEPTABLE. ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. We can and we will do better. Come see what I mean on Wed.”
On another note, I have been wanting to comment on a posting earlier this month about the open source project called Posh (PowerShell) + bash(one of the Unix shells). Yes, I’m a little late commenting on this news item, but I don’t like just reposting things. Instead, I like to talk about things.
PASH in short, is a project that is geared at allowing PowerShell to run on other environments. For example, in the current alpha release of the project, they are able to get PowerShell running on “All 32-bit MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP), All BSD Platforms (FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/Apple Mac OS X), All POSIX (Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes), WinCE.”
In my opinion, this is really cool stuff. After all, PowerShell is designed to make systems management easier. Granted, older shells that live on other platforms (or Windows in some cases) were also designed to accomplish the same feat. They have also been very organic in their growth and based on older frameworks. In other words, when you take something that was good 20 years ago and keep bolting on functionality you end up with something that is still good but prone to strangeness. Kind of like an old jalopy that spend your weekends working on in order to get the injectors firing at the correct times. :>)
I hate working on cars almost as much as I hate dealing with wacky shells or even wackier and inefficient scripting languages. PowerShell has saved me numerous hours of command line and scripting fun (pain). So… by taking PowerShell to other platforms only further extends my happy time to other platforms. :>)
