The PowerShell team is excited to announce that starting today we are licensing the language specification for Windows PowerShell 2.0 under the Microsoft Community Promise.

This means that now anyone can implement PowerShell on any platform they want to.  We know some of our most passionate customers sometimes work on platforms that can’t run PowerShell today, so when writing this specification, we wrote it in a platform neutral manner.

We hope to see implementations on all of your favorite platforms.  This would benefit the industry, our partners, and our customers.  We told you that you should learn PowerShell and we would do everything we could to make it the best investment you ever made.  Specifying the language and enabling the community to implement it is yet another step in that direction.

Wait, did I just hear you ask: “what language specification?”  Grab it here – hot off the press:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=509b77d0-5e5f-4194-a2d0-61648abfd093

Even if you aren’t planning on implementing the language, you might still find the specification to be an interesting read.  Some reviewers said the specification helped clear up some aspects of the language.

If you’re a language geek like me, love implementing languages, and love PowerShell, then this news and documentation should give you plenty of incentive to get started.  Be sure to check out the community promise before getting started:

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx

Jason Shirk
Windows PowerShell SDE
Microsoft Corporation