SAPIEN Technologies

We are currently running a survey about PowerShell adoption. If you haven’t had a chance yet to participate, please go here to do so: Take the survey

I would like to thank all those who already took the survey for participating and for leaving a huge amount of very interesting comments.

One thing that really stands out from all the comments is that those enthusiastic about PowerShell totally get it and dive into it. Then there are those who haven’t had a chance to look at it yet or only briefly touched it. One comment sums up this feeling pretty well, so let me quote this here: “…It seems that VBScript is now passe and I need to know PowerShell. I wonder if it’s really that good.”

The question if PowerShell replaces VBScript comes up quite often and I receive a large number of emails from customers seeking confirmation that we will not abandon VBScript as a supported language in PrimalScript. So I guess now is as good a time as any to provide some insight into our thinking.

As far as I know, Microsoft has no plans whatsoever to remove VBScript from the core Windows OS. Will PowerShell become part of every Windows OS version? Yes. I have no doubt about that. It is simply too powerful a tool to not do that. So basically they will coexist. We will support them both to the best of our abilities.

But, even if you jump into PowerShell, that does not mean that you will HAVE to use this great technology only from a command line interface. If that is something you like, great. If not, I wouldn’t worry. PowerShell is fortunately relatively simple to host and you will see PowerShell enhanced products come up everywhere. We already provide an object to use PowerShell from VBScript and we just added support to PrimalScript for PowerShellASP, a server side technology using PowerShell as server-side script.

Cmdlets are something everyone will need to learn and get used to. Whether we will use  them from a shell, a product, or any scripting language doesn’t matter; they are the new glue technology that ties products and the underlying operating system together. If you know your cmdlets you will do fine with PowerShell, in whatever environment or context you will use it.