Coming soon: I’ll be publishing a series of blog articles on building a simple cmdlet for Windows PowerShell. The bade news is that you’ll need to use Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Basic .NET to follow along – the good news is that it isn’t going to be nearly as hard as that sounds!
If you’re interested, you’ve got a few days to get ready: Start by downloading a FREE copy of Visual Studio 2005 Express from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/download/. Or… since cmdlets don’t have a graphical user interface… you could actually use SAPIEN PrimalScript 4.1 Enterprise! Yup, it provides full VB.NET support. So if you have that, then you’re all set on the development environment.
You’ll also need v3.0 of the .NET Framework SDK. Strangely, you won’t need v3.0 of the Framework itself – just the SDK. You’ll find it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C2B1E300-F358-4523-B479-F53D234CDCCF&displaylang=en; and you DO NOT need Windows Vista, even though the title of the download might make it seem like you do.
Get all those bits installed, and be prepared to follow along as I show you how to build some simple cmdlets, and then step up into increasingly complex cmdlets. Sure, this might not be for the faint of heart… but think about it: Without spending any money (if you use the free Express edition of Visual Studio, that is), you can actually extend the Windows PowerShell “language” to do whatever you might need! This is perhaps the first time in history that this capability has been within reach of Windows administrators – so take advantage!
Technorati Tags:
Cmdlets
PowerShell Development
