In addition to being a scripting language, Windows PowerShell is also used as a platform in many applications. This is possible because the Windows PowerShell engine can be hosted inside an application. This blog post and the next will deal with the various APIs available for hosting Windows PowerShell in a C# application. The most important type...

Common Information Model (CIM) cmdlets have been around for a while, and come in handy when you are performing any CIM operation in PowerShell. They are easy to use, and provide a good user experience. In this blog post, I cover a few tips and tricks that can be useful for users of CIM cmdlets. To get started, let’s get the complete list of ...

This post is a part of the nine-part “What’s New in Windows Server & System Center 2012 R2” series that is featured on Brad Anderson’s In the Cloud blog.  Today’s blog post covers Out-Of-Band hardware management using new PCSVDevice cmdlets and how it applies to the larger topic of “Transform the Datacen...

This post is a part of the nine-part “What’s New in Windows Server & System Center 2012 R2” series that is featured on Brad Anderson’s In the Cloud blog.  Today’s blog post covers management of network switches using CIM and WS-Man standards and how it applies to the larger topic of “Transform the Datacenter.”  To read that post and see the oth...

We presented following sessions at this year’s edition of TechEd(s). At TechEd, we announced the newest feature in Windows PowerShell 4.0 – Desired State Configuration, so do check out the attached demos for it!! Desired State Configuration in Windows PowerShell Advance Automation using Windows PowerShell ...

With the availability of Windows 8.1 Preview and Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, we hope everyone has been enjoying our updates to Windows PowerShell and other management tools. We especially hope you’re having fun with our newest feature, Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration. Because we want as many people as possible to benefit fr...

Type Conversion in PowerShell is, without question, one of the most useful ingredients in its "Magic Sauce" of administrator effectiveness. When you run a command with a specific parameter type (I.e.: a DateTime or a TimeSpan), things seem to "just work". For example, consider this recent question / info dump on Twitter: #P...

For those who are familiar with Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell, you know that we haven't released additional updates to it since we published the release candidate (RC) in August 2012. Over the past few months, we have been talking with customers and partners and taking a hard look at the adoption rate of the RC in terms of the nu...

We're pleased to announce the availability of the Windows PowerShell 3.0 SDK Sample Pack. For Windows PowerShell 3.0, the SDK samples work a little differently than in previous releases of Windows PowerShell. For Windows PowerShell 2.0, we released a separate standalone SDK to the Download Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=180421. Th...

We are delighted to broadcast that the community will hold the first German PowerShell Community Conference on April 10 and 11, 2013 in Oberhausen, Germany.  As shown by the “sold out” PowerShell Summit for North America, there is a real need for PowerShell focused conferences that offer the attendees the opportunity to dig deep in...