PowerShell Abstractions & the Community

re: PowerShell Abstractions & the Community

Fulgan — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:50:32 GMT

Ok, I'll bite.

I've been one of these admins who looked at powershell, got excited by the possibility only to realize that the whole thing was a completely new abstraction. It required me to learn a new language, new paradigm and, basically, a whole new development and runtime environment to get these goodies.

Then I looked back: since I'm also a programmer, I now have a number of toolkits available to me: CMD scripts are still a very powerfull tool and a basic "must know" skill in administering any windows environment, VBScript is used all over Microsoft office and therefore I need it to support the Excel cowboys in the office, C# and Delphi, coupled with COM and WMI are there for me to turn to when an impossible to solve problem arise and they both have immense intrinsic value of their own.

What does Powershell offer ? It's a new skill, but it isn't any easier to learn than the old ones and actually MUCh harder to learn the batch sctipting. In fact, it could be argued that without a good knowledge of WMI, it lose a lot of it's usefullness. But it doesn't bring any of the advantages of the others.

In that context, and keeping in mind that I might just be a grumpy old admin who, among others, doesn't want to invest time to learn yet another language for minimal apparent benefit, could you explain what you think are the big "selling points" of PowerShell ?

re: PowerShell Abstractions & the Community

Hugo Peeters — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:12:23 GMT

I totally agree. I've started blogging about Powershell and VMware management through Powershell (using the VI Toolkit) several months ago and have been rewarded by several hundred visits to my site already! I learn a lot by reading other blogs. So I think of blogging as a way of giving something back.

re: PowerShell Abstractions & the Community

schiphol — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:43:42 GMT

I don't understand, can we all subscribe for this?

re: PowerShell Abstractions & the Community

Steven Murawski — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:54:54 GMT

Just to add to #3 - participate in the IRC channel - #powershell.

It provides an opportunity to learn and help others learn in near real time.

Or write an email or send feedback to the a podcast that talks about PowerShell (like the PowerScripting Podcast, or Mind Of Root, or the new podcast from Jonathan Medd - Get-Scripting).

re: PowerShell Abstractions & the Community

sepeck — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:28:16 GMT

Getting people to understand the benefit of community participation is always a challenge. You will have those that 'get it' and as a result benefit and those that remain confused.

@flugan - As one who falls in the class of 'not a developer', I have to disagree. I will admit, I do not have to support office products so don't have to support vbScript in Office applications but PowerShell is easier to use in many ways than batch scripting.

With batch scripting you had to learn an entire range of tools both native and third party to really do anything useful. This model is not really different with PowerShell and is arguably easier with much more consistent documentation available (help about_) then was ever available with batch scripting.

COM? Use that... skip. WMI, well, there are a lot of examples that one can puzzle through and piece together without really knowing much about WMI. I have managed to do that and I now know more then I did but still I am able to create and piece together very useful scripts/tools than I have before with vbScript.

Going forward, as 'not a developer' admin, PowerShell is providing a nice consistent interface for me to leverage across several technologies. I use it with the Quest AD cmdlets to pull reports, I use it with the VMware Toolkit to pull reports and modify system properties. My co-workers are looking at the Citrix PowerShell offerings to see if they will help them.

I look forward to eventually Exchange 2007 tools and when we deploy SCOM. Having a nice standard scripting environment across several of the technologies I work with and that is more logical then vbScript ever pretended to be is fantastic for me (even without using COM and a minimal amount of WMI).

See my site for various simple things I have learned and accomplished with PowerShell and a minimal time investment. For a more stark comparison, see a friends (he wrote a lot of vbScripts) article here: http://www.ericwoodford.com/powershell-power-story

For a more concrete example