Autoupgrade for PowerShell snapins?

There’s an interesting side-effect of being agile and releasing updates too often – not everyone is able to keep track of your updates and upgrade to the latest version.

With rich applications this is kind of easier. For example, PowerGUI checks for newer version on start-up (we even have a bug when it manages to display the notification behind the splash screen) and offers to perform the upgrade.

By how would you handle the same issue in the command-line?

AD cmdlets 1.0.0 had issues installing on Vista/Longhorn. We fixed this in 1.0.1. The current version freely available for download is 1.0.3 and there are still people trying to use 1.0.0 and suffering from all the issues we have fixed a long time ago.

Is anyone trying to solve similar issues with other PowerShell snapins? Any advice?

One thing I find useful is making PowerShell at least display the snapin version so you know which computer has which version installed (yes, you can look this up in Add/Remove Programs but that’s not that handy.) For AD cmdlets you can do this by checking the version info with the following command:

(get-command (get-pssnapin Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement).ModuleName).FileVersionInfo.ProductVersion

Or even modify your profile to have that displayed at each startup:

# add the following code to your profile
# this gives the greeting message with the version info

"Loaded AD cmdlets v."+ (get-command (get-pssnapin Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement).ModuleName).FileVersionInfo.ProductVersion

# this changes the window caption:
function Prompt
{
$host.ui.RawUI.WindowTitle = "ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory (beta) v."+ (gcm (get-pssnapin Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement).ModuleName).FileVersionInfo.ProductVersion
"PS> "
}

But this still does not give auto-update… Can you even have the snapins go to the internet, check for latest version, download it and start the upgrade?

Tags: AD cmdlets, PowerShell, software development

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