The Future Is Here Today

PowerShell Team

Would like to see what a PowerShell V2 world would look like?  If so, check out Jaykul Bennett’s Select-Grid script HERE. 

Here is what impresses me so much about this:

1. It is very useful to a broad range of users.
2. It is simple to use and beautiful. 
3. It leverages WPF.
4. It is a well formed formal cmdlet.
5. The code is pithy and self documenting.  200 lines of script.

Imagine hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of other 200 line scripts with similar power. 
Imagine people taking this base script and adding 10 more lines to to things just they way they need them to be.  The might not have been able to write the script from scratch but it is not that hard to add 10 lines to an existing script.
Now imagine that have a graphics friend and you ask them to replace the WPF with something better looking from one of their professional XAML tools (e.g. Blend) and you get to use that XAML by just referring to it.

I predict that PowerShell V2 is going to produce a great virtuous cycle!

The one downside to the implementation is that it “leaks” it’s utility functions.  In other words it has a number of helper functions like: Get-Max, Get-DefaultValue, Get-PropertyTypes, etc.  When you dot-source the file, these helper functions are visible as well which means that they’ll collide with others if you dot source something else that uses those names.  This is exactly the problem that MODULES are designed to solve. So I hope the next version is released as a module.

 Wonderful stuff Jaykul!

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx

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