Windows PowerShell

By being labeled as a staunch proponent of the Open Source initiative, it's hard for some of my friends to grasp the idea of me being a Microsoft Student Partner. Well lets just say I keep an open mind. The fanboy sects of Apple, Google and Microsoft are just marketing strategies formulated to increases sales. I had a great conversation with Jennifer Perret over dinner a while ago regarding Microsoft's stance on the media's hate for Microsoft and the media darling (as quoted from her) status of Apple and Google. Yes, Microsoft have made mistakes in the past and there is a new atmosphere which is reflets to a more agile and dynamic Microsoft. The new Zune and Xbox 360 stands to this testament.

I am going to discuss about Windows Power Shell which is a command line interface shell which is available for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista. It is also an optional feature in Windows Server 2008. It is based on the .NET Framework. I am familiar with bash scripting on *nix and it's interesting to see that PowerShell does have some nifty features which is a far cry from the current command line interface shell. The screenshot shows a few commands like finding processes which uses > 20 GMB of memory, listing processes which start with v and watching the firefox process and waiting for it to terminate. Do check out the blog of Windows PowerShell team here. There's even a post about creating your very own commands which can be found here.

PowerShell in action