Superstar Tobias Weltner (of PowerShell.com and Powershell Plus fame) sent me some mail today pointing to this May 14th article Three Essential PowerShell 2.0 Remote Management Features.  It is a very good article except for this part:

“PowerShell 2.0 is built into Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. For older operating systems, PowerShell 2.0 is scheduled to be available a few months down the road and will include support for Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008.”

That is not right.  PowerShell V2 has been available for these OS for quite some time now.  You can download the packages here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=151321

We are responsible for the confusion because our redistribution is not called PowerShell V2, its called Windows Management Framework.  Let’s talk about what motivated that change.  In the past, we had a dogs breakfast of management technologies, each releasing on it’s own schedule with it’s own installer, it own approach to supporting downlevel OSes etc.  We were trying “shipping our organization”.  What is worse is that we never had anyone making sure that these things worked together (they did  but if they didn’t, there was no one to hold accountable).  Having spent the majority of my career building management products and solutions, I knew that this inconsistency was a problem for the very community we were trying to help.

What we needed to do is to provide a single package with all the management technologies that customers needed.  That is what we developed and we called it the Windows Management Framework. 

That is why you don’t have a “downlevel package for PowerShell V2”, you have a downlevel package for management.

Enjoy!

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Distinguished Engineer
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx