What’s New In PowerShell 2

At work, where I do most of my PowerShell, we’ve only just shifted off XP, so until recently I’d not really looked much into the differences between PowerShell 1 and 2. The ISE is pretty good (its a debugger!), support for webservices is a few years too late (but very welcome) and I can see Remote PowerShell being pretty useful.

So I’d not really been keeping up. If anything I was deliberately ignoring it, to avoid the temptation to write something that would require upgrading the server. But eventually, I cracked[1].

Oh My God.

Put aside for the moment the absolute avalanche[2] of new cmdlets (write-verbose, out-gridview, select-xml[3], measure-object etc…), and put aside for the moment support for background jobs, the wonderful -split and -join operators, and even put aside how tab-completion now works for .net static methods...

Tab completion now works for script functions and their parameters. You can type in a function on one line, and be happily tab-completing it on the next. You can even add comment-based or XML help, though probably not at the console.

Once again, PowerShell rocks

 

[1] Blame PowerDbg

[2] Some guy[4] is writing a blog series on every new cmdlet!

[3] Select-Xml: Here’s one I used today at work to get all the references from all the C# project files within a folder hierarchy. Sure you could do it all before with XmlDocument, but check this out:

PS > dir . -filter:*.csproj -Recurse | `
Select-Xml -XPath:'//*[local-name() = "Reference"]' | `
Select-Object -ExpandProperty Node

Include
-------
System
System.Core
System.Xml.Linq
System.Data.DataSetExtensions
System.Data
System.Xml

[4] He’s called Jonathan Medd, but the ‘some guy’ thing has a certain ring to it…

[5] Oh, and proper try{}catch{}finally{} error handling. I missed that