Naming Shells and Consoles

PowerShell Team

Recently a product team asked me what entries they should put into their Program Groups folder.  They need an entry to launch their admin GUI and to launch  PowerShell with their snapin (they could do this by launching a Minishell which is a non-extensible version of PowerShell that has that products snapins baked in or they could do this by launching PowerShell specifying a console file (-PSConsoleFile ) which has their snapins).

The question was – what should they call the PowerShell link.  I thought a number of different options and then decided to look and see what the Exchange team had done.  Those guys are great so you are never wrong to go take a look at how they do things. 

Exchange has the following links in their Program Groups folder:

• “Exchange Management Console” for their GUI (EMC)

• “Exchange Management Shell” for their Powershell Link (EMS)

That looks like a pretty good solution to me.  Use the term “Console” for your GUI and “Shell” for your PowerShell shell.

So remember -the lesson for the day is:  When in doubt, see what Exchange did.  🙂

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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