PowerShell V2 Feature Overview

In Barcelona, PowerShell architect Jeffrey Snover disclosed some details about the next PowerShell generation called V2. First of all, there will be another public pre-Beta ("CTP") available in December, allowing you to test-drive all the new features.

Jeffrey Snover presenting PowerShell V2 Features at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona

Don't panic: All you did and do with the current version of PowerShell will continue to work in V2. And the PowerShell Editor PowerShellPlus is also compatible both with version 1 and version 2.

Some Announcements

Jeffrey made a couple of announcements. PowerShell V2 will be included by default in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 which are generally expected to be released late in 2009 or early 2010. Server Core is going to support PowerShell V2 as well.

New Tools and UIs

Although V2 primarily remains a command console, it comes with "ISE", an integrated script environment which turns out to be a simple PowerShell editor with code highlighting and basic debugging. It will serve as a free entry-level editor for the masses, leaving room for more specialized and professional editors such as PowerShellPlus. And V2 comes with a new gridview. Pipe your results to Out-GridView, and you can explore and discover objects, group them and use a full text search to filter the results.

Then Snover started to demo the new key features in V2:

Remoting

Execute PowerShell code on remote machines, 1:1 or 1:many, and use a wealth of protocols that can even manage systems across firewalls. This is probably the most important feature, allowing Administrators to control their entire IT with PowerShell. Read more.

Transaction Support

Turn a series of commands into one singular transaction. Either it succeeds or it fails, but never again will a script leave you in an undetermined state because of some error that occurred in the middle of a sequence of commands. Read more.

Inline Code and Dynamic Types

Execute C# or VB.NET code as part of PowerShell scripts, and expand your command repository with API calls.

Script Cmdlets

These are basically functions that use the same advanced Cmdlet parameter validation previously only available in "real" Cmdlets.

Jobs

Launch long-running tasks in the background and come back to them later to check how they performed.

Throttling

Controls how many jobs will be executed at any single time to avoid resource problems when executing jobs against hundreds or thousands of machines at the same time.

Improved WMI Support

Among the new features is the ability to run WMI queries as background jobs

Eventing

Support for asynchroneous operations that can call back and inform PowerShell when certain conditions are met.

In addition, Snover pointed out: "Deal with the way the world is, not how the world should be", and PowerShell should take it from there. While you will see more and more management areas to support PowerShell directly (roughly 400 new cmdlets in Server 2008 R2), V2 is prepared to bail out and use other technologies as well, such as .NET, COM, WMI, ADSI, API-calls etc.  With OpenPegasus and OpenWSMan, V2 will be able to control even Non-Windows systems, making it a perfect management architecture even for heterogenous environments.

In future blog posts I will explain in detail the new V2 features.

Let the PowerShell be with you!

-Tobias

PowerShellPlus