Monday, January 28, 2008

MSDN Library Community Content and PowerShell

Microsoft turned on the community content feature of the MSDN site in late 2006, just over a year ago. That meant users could add content to MSDN in the way of additional samples,commentary, best practices, and even just simple typos! If you navigate to the root of the MSDN library page(http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx) you can see the statistics relating to the community content.

Thus far, I've added over 120 samples - mainly using PowerShell with a variety of components, including COM, WMI and .NET. I enjoy being one of the top contributors! I wonder if anyone over at Microsoft has noticed!

Over the past couple of days, I've been using PowerShell with several WMI and .NET objects and tonight I'm playing with the GPMC Com object.It's great that you can do so much with PowerShell, but the sheer inconsency of things lower down in the technology stack are infuriating. Sometimes things are case sensitive, other times not, some times you use quotes to hold names, other times not, etc - you probably know what I mean. This is not PowerShell's fault, but the result of a huge amount of parallel uncoordinated development within MS and therefore part of your learning curve.

The big advantage, however, of PowerShell is that you can do SO much all with one basic tool. And with a bit of work, you can write functions (and soon real cmdlets) in script that hide some of the nasty details.

PowerShell Rocks!!

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