Wow – the NY Times is Johnny-on-the-spot with their analysis of the 10 best features of Windows 7 for IT Pros HERE.  It turns out that PowerShell is responsible for 3 of them!   Come review time, I’m telling my boss that we’re responsible for 30% of the value of W7.  🙂 !!!  Just to be clear – I’m totally joking.  Windows 7 is an awesome release.  It has a ton of great stuff in it.  PowerShell IS awesome but it is a tiny just one of the huge wave of improvements.  You’ll decided for yourself but we are all extremely proud and optimistic about W7. 

Check it out:

Windows Troubleshooting Platform

The Windows Troubleshooting Platform is a new, comprehensive approach to solving end user problems via troubleshooting packs, which address problems and can be applied to PCs throughout the environment to rectify those issues; and the Windows Troubleshooting Toolkit, which allows you as the administrator to create your own troubleshooting packs when you identify specific issues within your own infrastructure. Also, but separately, a new Problem Steps Recorder allows an end user to record the steps he takes leading up to a problem, capture those steps into automatically created screen grabs, and e-mail that to an administrator or help desk representative for easier problem resolution.

Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment

With PowerShell’s popularity, Microsoft has introduced into Windows 7 a graphical interface for PowerShell that makes it very easy to learn the scripting language and use it in a color-coded, easy-to-read environment. Developing, debugging and running the scripts in this new environment is much easier than the previous single-command-prompt method.

PowerShell Remoting

Also new to PowerShell is support for the WS-Management protocol that allows you to remotely run commands on client PCs. You can use this capability on a one-to-one basis, say for specific requests in response to help desk calls, or you can fan out with one-to-many remoting and run cmdlets on multiple PCs from within the Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment.

The reason why I’m counting Troubleshooting is because it is all PowerShell based!   (I’m actually listening to their talk at the PDC right now – it’s so cool!).  That team had their own design for diagnostics and when they stepped back and looked at it they concluded that at the end of the day, they were going to live or die based upon CONTENT.  They looked at the effort involved with getting that content and then looked at the power and momentum that PowerShell had and decided to take a dependency on us.  Great stuff!

Thanks to Narayanan Lakshmanan for pointing this article out.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
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