You need a Windows PowerShell overview now. But first we need to tell you that PowerShell is a framework that automates tasks. It comes integrated with the .NET framework. It is made up of an associated scripting language and a command-line shell. You will be able to do administrative tasks in remote and local Windows systems. Powershell gives you full access to WMI and COM.
In the next lines of this Windows PowerShell overview you will know many interesting things about this computer program. We will talk about Powershell V2 and its features, cmdlets, embedding Powershell in management applications, scripting, pipelines and more. You can consider this article as a Windows PowerShell short review because we are going to talk about many cool features of PowerShell.
In this Windows PowerShell overview we must tell you that you can execute four types of commands here: cmdlets, scripts, functions and executable programs. PowerShell.exe will launch an executable program in a separate process. A PowerShell process will execute a cmdlet. The output of the commands will be displayed in a command line interface. Here you will enter the commands as well. You will not find syntax highlighting in PowerShell but it comes with a Win32 console in its user interface with customizable tab completion built-in.
PowerShell translates into invocations of the original commands the creation of aliases by cmdlets. You can use positional and named parameters for commands. The parameters of external executables will be passed via the argv variable array to be parsed by the executable. For cmdlets, PowerShell itself will bind the argument to the value.
Cmdlets are used in Powershell to implement specific functions. They are specialized commands indeed. When Powershell needs to instantiate and invoke .NET classes it uses the help of cmdlets. “Modules” is the name of a more portable version of Cmdlets added in PowerShell V2. PowerShell also implements a pipeline like Unix and Linux. A pipeline will take the output of a cmdlet to another cmdlet.
As you can see, this Windows PowerShell overview has many interesting things. Now we are going to talk about scripting. Windows PowerShell uses cmdlets imperatively to implement complex operations using a dynamically typed scripting language. This scripting language support .NET integration, functions, branching, variables, loops, error/exception handling and closures/lambda expressions. Binary prefix notations are supported by the Windows PowerShell scripting language as well.
You can embed PowerShell in a management application to implement the management functionally using its runtime. If you want to use this feature you need to use its managed hosting API. The process of the application will be run using a “runspace”. You must also create a pipeline if you want to run a command.
Microsoft has released PowerShell V2 with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. With this new version of PowerShell you can run scripts and cmdlets on a remote machine. You can also invoke a pipeline or script asynchronously. Transactional operations are allowed with the help of cmdlet as well. Using the scripting language of PowerShell you can create cmdlets.
In the above lines we have been talking about many things in this Windows PowerShell overview. One of the most important things about this computer program is that you can execute many types of files. This way you will have more room to maneuver in your programming tasks. You need to initiate .NET classes when you use cmdlets. Using a dynamically typed scripting language you can use cmdlets imperatively as we have told you in the above lines. When you create aliases using cmdlets, PowerShell will translate them into invocations of the original command.
This Windows PowerShell overview is important because you will have more things to implement when you know about the features of this software. Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 were released with PowerShell included. You can do an awesome job in remote server using PowerShell V2 and cmdlets. They will help you perform transactional operations. You have learned a lot of things in this Windows PowerShell overview. Cmdlets, PowerShell V2, types of commands allowed and many other things have been explained. The managed hosting API is another really cool feature that you can take advantage of right away as well.