PowerShell v3 - A Quick First Look

A preview (emphasis on the preview) of PowerShell v3 was made available in the early hours of this morning following the announcement at the Build conference. Apparently they are also planning to ship something with it called Windows 8. You can download the Windows Developer preview from MSDN to get an early look at it.

Well we know for sure that it is new:

and it is version 3:

$host.version.major

And it is a .NET 4 app (CLRVersion)

$psversiontable

From the standard PowerShell modules we have a total of 248 cmdlets

(Get-Command -Module Microsoft.PowerShell.\*).count

However, there are a total of 239 modules that have shipped in the OS, though a large part of these are CIM based.

(Get-Module -ListAvailable -All).count

Excluding the CIM modules, there are 44 modules

Get-Module -ListAvailable

And obviously within each module there is plenty of good content:

Get-Command -Module PrintManagement

New Feature!

In previous versions of PowerShell if you needed to use a cmdlet from a module you first needed to import the module. In v3 the module is loaded when you type the command - even better, you get tab completion on the command before the module is loaded!

Note how the NetTCPIP module is loaded after a command from the module, Get-NetRoute, is loaded.

Get-Module

Get-NetRoute | Out-Null

Get-Module

Anyone think I should run a blog series called PowerShell 3.0 One Cmdlet at a Time? It might take a while….. ;-)