I was delighted to discover that DesktopEngineer.Com is now offering Windows PowerShell training: http://desktopengineer.com/ps310 .  This is the first (and therefore BEST :-) ) commercial training available for PowerShell (formally known as Monad).  I consider this a huge milestone for the project. 

One of my core beliefs is:

Technology is great but technology that matters is technology that creates an economic advantage.

This is the core principle of the PowerShell architecture and it influenced almost every element of the system.  There are three aspects to this principle:

  1. Developers should find it cheap and easy to code to PowerShell and the benefit PowerShell delivers to their customers should be ENORMOUS (leverage).
  2. End Users should be able to use PowerShell to increase their economic value by being able to dramatically lower costs through simple automation of complex things (productivity) and by using PowerShell to learn valuable .NET skills (marketability).
  3. Third parties should be able extend and participate in most aspects of PowerShell to deliver enough value that they can charge a lot of money and customers are happy to spend the money (commercialization).

We have seen lots of evidence of the first two aspects since the very beginning of the project.  It is great to now see the beginning of the commercialization phase of the project.  Exchange 2007 and MOM will be shipping with Powershell support. Opalis announced support for PowerShell in their product at MMS ( http://www.opalis.com/upload/pressreleases/OpalisPressRelease250406.pdf ).  The great O'Reilly book ( http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/msh/ ) has been available for a while now and there are a few more books due out this fall (http://www.manning.com/payette/  &  http://www.sapienpress.com/powershell.asp) .  I just installed the latest Alpha version of Sapien's PrimalScript IDE supporting PowerShell.  Now you can get training from DesktopEngineering.com (http://desktopengineer.com/ps310). 

The availability of commerical PowerShell training is particularly nice to see as the team is starting to get a number of requests from the field to come provide training to large customer XXX.  That is exciting but there is absolutely no way our team could scale to meet the demand of for this.  So 3 cheers for DesktopEngineering for being first into the pool!

Jeffrey Snover
Windows PowerShell Architect