Port 25 - Communications from the open source community at Microsoft

I can’t recall if I have ever blogged about this, but we certainly have shown interviews here on Port25 with Jeffery Snover, Architect of PowerShell.  PowerShell is a command-line shell and scripting language for Windows:  Think consistent syntax and standard utilities that make managing and administering Windows much easier. Powershell is not yet in the market (of course there are release candidates you can get here).  But the community is growing. 

Here’s some stuff I’ve found:

• PowerGadgets – very cool gadgets that show off Powershell as truly the next generation command line environment - http://www.powergadgets.com/tutorials/powershellTutorial.aspx - check out the Chart Templates demo (this is awesome)
• NewsGator Powershell Provider (my favorite RSS reader): http://www.codeplex.com/NewsGatorPSProvider
• Powershell Analyzer: www.powershellanalyzer.com
• Powershell Community Extensions: http://www.codeplex.com/PowerShellCX 
• NetCmdlets – commercial add-ins for network and messaging management, some good ideas here: http://www.nsoftware.com/powershell/default.aspx   Quest and Full Armor are also doing great things in this area.
• Expose SharePoint as a filesystem: http://www.codeplex.com/PSSharePoint
• There was a ‘Powershell Week’ in November and here’s a list of all sorts of webcasts, virtual labs, and something called a ‘labcast’ - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/webcasts/ps.mspx
• A Visual Studio command shell: http://www.codeplex.com/VSCmdShell
• MySpace is using Powershell already (MySpace has the most Web traffic in the world, by the way)
• ….and much more, scripts to upload pictures to flickr, alarm clocks using iTunes, and on and on

It’s great to see the community growth around Powershell, and I can’t wait to see this community grow even more after Powershell is generally available (and I love that a lot of this is happening on Codeplex).   And remember, Powershell runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server “Longhorn”.

Cheers to the re-birth of the command line!

-Bill