PowershellPlus beta 2

This is sort of exciting - PowerShellPlus v2.1 Beta is live! I’ve used PowerShell Plus for some time and love it. As you might guess from the name, PowerShellPlus is an interactive scripting environment for Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's command line shell and scripting language, and it’s great.

Microsoft's PowerShell is itself a worthy addition to any Windows administrator's toolkit, making it easy to extend your reach, improving and automating computer administration.

PowerShell is Microsoft's administrative shell and scripting product, combining the interactive composability of the best of the UNIX/Linux shells, the programming power of Perl or Ruby and the richness of .NET, WMI and COM.

PowerShell is an add-on part of Windows Server 2008 and is also supported, via a download, on Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003. Out of the box PowerShell comes with interfaces directly into WMI, COM and .NET, plus a set of built-in cmdlets and providers. Based on these lower-level features, you can write your own cmdlets and providers, plus you can write scripts, functions and set up profile files to further customise your PowerShell usage.

PowerShellPlus is an interactive scripting environment for Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's command line shell and scripting language, and it’s great. But there are things that I've been hoping to see in the next version, in particular the CTP3 support.

Well, now we have that in the new beta of PowerShellPlus. The features in the new beta that have caught my eye are: VBS support, STA Mode, Code Sharing and of course, CTP3 support.

I’ll be posting more in my blog once I have a chance to give it a good test! However, I’ve already been using it a bit lately and I can’t wait for it to go final!

One really neat feature I’ve just discovered in PowerShellPlus is the Shft+Enter feature. If like me, you find CMD.EXE still has the occasional feature that PowerShell doesn’t quite meet (dir /s and dir /ad are two that are much harder in PowerShell), then you can enter the command and instead of hitting Enter, hit Shift+Enter and the cmd will be run by CMD.EXE.

So inside PowerShell Plus, it looks like this:


PSH [C:\]: dir foo*.* /s                    <--- plus Shift+Enter
Volume in drive C is XP_32bit
Volume Serial Number is 44B8-CFED

Directory of C:\

10/02/2009 16:59

<<DIR>>   foo
            0 File(s)                 0 bytes

Directory of C:\foo

10/02/2009 16:59 7 foo.foo
16/05/2008 13:18 121,306 foo.txt
              2 File(s)              121,313 bytes

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\HelpTours\htmlTour

04/08/2004 12:00 1,777 footer.htm
              1 File(s) 1,777 bytes

Total Files Listed:
              3 File(s) 123,090 bytes
              1 Dir(s) 8,188,985,344 bytes free

PSH [C\:]:


Super cool! Yet another reason for serious scripters to buy PowerShell Plus! You'll find more details of pricing and availability at Idera