PowerShell Goes to RC2

Published: September 27, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft is going back to the future with the introduction of a command-line, DOS-like environment called PowerShell, and that future is almost here, as Microsoft's delivery this week of PowerShell Release Candidate 2 (RC2) shows.

PowerShell (formerly called "Monad") will enable Windows administrators to accomplish some tasks extremely quickly. While the GUI is great for a lot of things and easy to learn, for some applications, you can't beat the speed and power of a command line (CL) interface and a powerful scripting language. Microsoft will give administrators the best of both GUI and CL worlds with PowerShell.

With this week's delivery of Windows PowerShell RC2, Microsoft showed it is still on track to deliver PowerShell as a free download by the end of the year. PowerShell is expected to be particularly useful for managing Exchange Server 2007 and working with System Center Operations Manager 2007 (formerly MOM).

Microsoft says it has addressed numerous customer requests with RC2. This includes the addition of direct ADSI support to allow IT Pros to more easily administer Active Directory; improved support for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) through the capability to change WMI properties via methods; new logical operators (XOR and binary XOR) that make it easier to write sophisticated scripts; and improved help content and functionality.

PowerShell RC2 can be downloaded at support.microsoft.com/kb/925228.

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