Did you know that you can manage your Windows Firewall with PowerShell?
Steve Crouse has posted his PowerPack for just that so you can easily learn the appropriate PowerShell commands by just performing the tasks in the PowerGUI admin console and seeing the code in the commands’ properties or on the PowerShell Code tab.
The pack turns PowerGUI into a quite advanced Firewall management console which I frankly find more useful than what ships with Windows natively. 
It gives a concise view of the local firewall settings, open ports, services, and allowed applications. You are able to quickly (and in bulk!) enable/disable most settings and remove unwanted open ports and allowed applications.
It can sometimes be difficult to find all these settings using the native tools. This PowerPack allows the user to configure the firewall from one easy to use location without all the frills of the native tools. Plus you get all the standard goodies of PowerGUI: reporting, filtering and so on. And obviously you can use it as a starting point to create standard firewall management PowerShell scripts which you can then schedule or deploy on multiple computers.
Great job by Steve! You can download the firewall pack from the PowerGUI library.
P.S. It looks like there are quite a few new packs in the library so I will be reviewing them within the next few week. You obviously don’t have to wait for that and can check them out yourself.
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