In my previous blog post, I mentioned that we were all very proud and optimistic about W7 and WS08R2.  There are tons of reasons for this including how well the project has been run, the hardcore focus on quality and performance, the great new features, etc.  Another reason we are so optimistic is the availability of new cmdlets.  There are so many teams doing so much good work with PowerShell that it would spin your head.  Unfortunately – it is there news to tell not ours so we can have to bite our tongues and can’t say anything.  We’ll know that the Pre-Beta is out, we had Dan Harman do a quick look-see at WS08R2 for cmdlet coverage.  What he did was to try and install as many roles/features as he could and then count the cmdlets. 

You need to understand the limitations of the information I’m about to give you.  First – Dan used last week’s build so they numbers may vary from what you see in the Prebeta.  Next, Dan installed as many roles as he could do easily but some of the roles require advanced configuration etc that he didn’t have time to pursue so we are reporting on the easy to install subset.  Next this ONLY reports CMDLET – it does not take into account Providers.  Also a number of these cmdlets are in fact tools which you feed data to so they actually do a ton of work but get counted as a single cmdlet (e.g. DiagPack and BestPractices cmdlets).   With all those caveats, here is what Dan found:

Roles installed:                  13/16

Role services installed: 94/101

Features installed:           40/40

CORE POWERSHELL

·         Microsoft.PowerShell.Core 37 Cmdlets

·         Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility 87 Cmdlets

·         Microsoft.PowerShell.Host 2 Cmdlets

·         Microsoft.PowerShell.Management 80 Cmdlets

·         Microsoft.PowerShell.Security 10 Cmdlets

·         Total: 216

ADDITIONAL

·         Microsoft.PowerShell.Diagnostics 4 Cmdlets

·         Microsoft.WSMan.Management 13 Cmdlets

·         ADRMS.PS.Admin 15 Cmdlets

·         Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager 3 Cmdlets

·         Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.Migration 5 Cmdlets

·         Windows.ServerBackup 30 Cmdlets

·         activedirectory 76 Cmdlets

·         BestPractices 4 Cmdlets

·         DiagPack 2 Cmdlets

·         FailoverClusters 66 Cmdlets

·         FileTransfer 8 Cmdlets

·         GroupPolicy 25 Cmdlets

·         NetworkLoadBalancingClusters 35 Cmdlets

·         PSDiagnostics 10 Cmdlets

·         RemoteDesktopServices  0 Cmdlets (?? – I think they’re just doing a provider)

·         WebAdministration 62 Cmdlets

·         Total: 358

 Net Total 574

Take that and add in the fact that W7 & WS08R2 will have PowerShell V2 which gives you mind-boggling set of new features including remoting and the ability for the community to write their own cmdlets using Powershell and PowerShell_ISE and I think it should be pretty obvious why we are so proud and optimistic about the upcoming Windows releases.

You should definately be planning to beta test these releases.  I think you will decide that you’ll want to adopt them sooner than later.  You’ll figure out what’s best for your circumstances but I think that what you’ll conclude.   

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
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