PowerShell v3 at BUILD Conference round-up

Now that all PowerShell sessions at Microsoft’s BUILD Windows conference are over, here’s my quick summary from the event from PowerShell perspective.

PowerShell was big in the session track of the conference. Even the server sessions which had nothing to do with PowerShell typically had PowerShell in demos when it came to server management tasks.

The biggest PowerShell highlight of the event was that Windows 8 ships with PowerShell v3 and the Windows server already has more than 2300 cmdlets in it!

Also, PowerShell v3 is not going to be a Windows 8 thing only. Jeffrey committed to shipping standalone PowerShell v3 setup for Windows 7 simultaneously with Windows 8, and a preview version of that Windows 7 setup might come as early as next week!

UPDATE: Here’s the Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 CTP setup.

Below are the highlights of the sessions and links to the video recordings and slides.

Sessions by Jeffrey and Refaat:

 Make your product manageable – session on the new manageability options in PowerShell v3:

• Now it is easier to write a WMI providers (for example skeleton is generated for you),
• WMI provider van be automatically converted to cmdlets so you get -whatif, etc.,
• Workflows are fully compatible with PowerShell and can be run directly from PowerShell, and PowerShell cmdlets can be used as Workflow activities,
• PowerShell Web API – REST (OData) API to PowerShell cmdlets.

Manage a highly-efficient environment at scale using the Windows Management Framework (WMF):

• New interfaces for CIM/WMI,
• Improvements in remoting,
• Workflows and cmdlets + suspend/resume and ability to survive reboots,
• Multiple improvements in PowerShell jobs including native support for jobs as Windows Scheduled Tasks,
• NanoWBEM – Microsoft’s Linux (!) component to make non-Windows and devices manageable from PowerShell.

Sessions featuring Jeffrey:

Windows Server 8 track keynote – Jeffrey Snover gives a demo on multi-machine management around 30 minutes into the session:

Windows Server 8 apps must run without a GUI  – great session on Server Core improvements with Jeffrey providing the big picture on it and PowerShell role in this set up:

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