Some interesting powershell stuff

One of the great things about Exchange 2007 is its use of the powershell. In what is a refreshing change for a windows based product, the command line administration of the product is actually richer & more powerful than the admin GUI.  While i don’t profess to be a command line master, my origins in the dos days still stick around and i have always been a fan of using the command line within the later releases of windows, hence the reason i find powershell so appealing.

So one of the blogs that i tend to watch is the one from the powershell team at Microsoft (http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell) and this week there have been some great posts up there.

Two that stuck out for me where a powershell cheat sheet and a great looking 3^rd party extension for powershell.

The cheat sheet provides a great little reference for a lot of the common stuff you do in powershell and can be found here in pdf format and here in word 2007 format.

The 3^rd party extension is from a company named nsoftware and the product is called NetCmdlets.  At the moment it is a collection of 20 great little commandlets that let you do things like send & receive email or retrieve webpages, so fairly basic tasks, but quite complex when you think about what it would take to do through scripts.  So another great example of powershells ability to take 10 or 20 lines of script code and replace it with a single command line. I think this product is a great example of the extensibility of the powershell environment and i really expect to see more of them appearing as the powershell grows in popularity.

Gordo