NOTE: For November only, we will host this the THIRD Thursday (Nov 18) instead of the second Thursday of the month.

Abstract

PowerShell is the new object-oriented automation framework from Microsoft.  PowerShell was released to web on October 16th, 2006 and has become a part of the Common Engineering Criteria for 2009.  This means that every server based product released from the Microsoft fiscal year of 2009 must support PowerShell.  Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 have PowerShell as their default command line environment.  PowerShell is baked in to a number of server products, ranging from Exchange to IIS to SharePoint to Systems Center: Virtual Machine Manager.

IT Pro's have been quickly learning PowerShell as current and upcoming Microsoft and ISV's products include PowerShell support or focus on PowerShell for their management and automation. PowerShell also provides a great framework for developers, allowing them to tap into WMI, COM, as well as the .NET Framework to accomplish various tasks like testing, build/deploy, provisioning/configuration, systems monitoring, and troubleshooting. PowerShell also exposes a framework for building a consistent management API and allows for the hosting of the runtime to provide your applications a scriptable engine.

Bio - Steven Murawski is a rabid PowerShell enthusiast who spends his free time contributing to open source projects, helping grow the PowerShell community both locally (through the Greater Milwaukee Script Club) and worldwide (through PowerShellCommunity.Org), and carrying the message of developing manageable and automate-able applications to all that will listen.