It’s easy not to notice all the great things that are available for extending PowerShell. For example, here are a couple of CodePlex projects that add PSDrives to PowerShell, allowing you to treat external storage systems as if they were a file system (like you can do with the registry).
http://www.codeplex.com/PSSharePoint connects to SharePoint Portal Server 2003, http://www.codeplex.com/PSBizTalk works with BizTalk Server, and http://www.codeplex.com/NewsGatorPSProvider actually works with NewsGator for obtaining RSS feeds. Neat. One, http://www.codeplex.com/JunglediskSnapIn, connects PowerShell to the Amazon S3 sotrage services (Jungledisk).
There are, of course, the PowerShell Community Extensions at http://www.codeplex.com/PowerShellCX, which are a must-have (although some of the cmdlets do overlap existing functionality in PowerShell – just functionality that isn’t in a cmdlet, but rather accessible through some other means like an object method).
And all of the above are open-source – the commercial world is catching on, too, with cool tools like www.PowerGadgets.com and, of course, our own www.PrimalScript.com. Worth checking out – you never know when some add-in will provide the exact “killer app” functionality that pushes you over the edge to start learning PowerShell!
PS. Don’t forget, you’ve only got until January 15th, next Monday, to claim your free upgrade to PrimalScript 4.1 from PrimalScript 4.0. It’s at www.primalscript.com/upgrade.asp if you haven’t yet taken advantage.
