blindpete's posterous

Well, I’m finally starting to recover from the “anti-coding” feelings I get while on vacation, and that means that I’m not only starting to think about writing code all the time, but I’m also back to writing about it on Twitter, FriendFeed and even Facebook … oh, and here!

So last night (in time for his appearance on the PowerScripting Podcast), James Brundage announced the release of the PowerShellPack which is an open source part of the Resource Kit for Windows 7.

The good news is that there is an astonishing amount of really useful stuff in this pack, and it’s all released under the open source Ms-PL license (the documentation is released under the Creative Commons‘ Attribution License).

I won’t repeat here the information that’s available on the PowerShellPack page, since you can go and read it there … but the standout stuff in my opinion are the functions around code generation, .net and COM ... as well as the scheduled tasks stuff. I’ve also heard the ISE Pack portion is very good as well (but honestly I don’t use the ISE myself). As a side note: James said last night that you shouldn’t even try running this stuff in PowerShell 1, and of course some of it is Windows 7 or Vista specific, like the Task Scheduler scripts…

Of course, the really obvious thing that I should be commenting on is WPK, which is essentially an alternative implementation of what I’ve done in PowerBoots! I’m still a little frustrated about that, as I offered to work with them, and they’ve released their code under the same Ms-PL license and everything … but they couldn’t accept my help/code just because I don’t work at Microsoft. I’m going to try to avoid going on a rant here, but it has to be said that someone high up at Microsoft really needs to start pushing the freedom to adopt outside code (like they did with JQuery) so that they no longer have to duplicate other people’s efforts. Ah well.

In any case, to be fair: it’s not that they “ripped off” my idea. A TCL-like environment for PowerShell is something that Jeffrey Snover had talked about a long time ago, and he actually shared some code with me that heavily influenced the way PowerBoots turned out…

The really good news is that since WPK is Ms-PL, I’m happily able to merge it into PowerBoots, and you’ll still get the backwards compatibility with PowerShell 1.0 and other features of PowerBoots, plus some of the great ideas that are in WPK as well. So look for a new PowerBoots release coming soon, and please feel free to ask for features that you think are missing.

As I'm working today will be trying this out and see how I can fit this in the daily Admin life