For windows developers, who miss bash.

Every time I tried explain my friends why they should use PowerShell, I didn’t have a good demo. Time to fix it!

Here is my collection of show-cases for awesome PowerShell features (with .gif demos!). It’s also a very brief introduction to PowerShell.

All demos recorded from powershell_ise.exe (PowerShell Intergrated Scripting Environment). It’s a full-functional terminal with some IDE bells and wistles. I recommend you to start exploring PowerShell from ise.

Disclamer: I work in Windows PowerShell team. This post is my personal opinion and doesn’t represent my employer position.

Use familiar unix-like aliases

They are mostly work as you expect!

ls is an alias for command Get-ChildItem.

ls

man is an alias for command Get-Help.

man

cat is an alias for command Get-Content.

cat

kill is an alias for command Stop-Process.

kill

Use intellisense in powershell_ise

Documentation (man) is a good thing, but you can do things much faster with intellisense. To bring intellisense use Ctrl + Space.

Beneficial if you understand basics of PowerShell naming conventions. These conventions tremendously increase explorability. They are enforced by Microsoft and community for a good reason. Main convention: all commands names are verb-noun pairs.

Explore available commands

Use intellisense to explore and pick an appropriate command. In this examle, I looked for a command to manage bitlocker (disk encryption on windows).

Then I used intellisense to explore and specify command parameters.

Explore available commands

Explore available methods and properties in the pipeline

Pipeline is one of the most awesome things in PowerShell. The basic idea: you pass objects (in fact .NET objects), not text streams. Then you can call methods and properties on objects passed in the pipeline. PowerShell can figure out a returned type of a command and use it to provide intellisense below in the pipeline.

Explore available methods and properties in the pipeline

$_ variable represents current object. See man about_Automatic_Variables for details.

Explore environment variables

Explore, get and set env variables from PowerShell.

Explore environment variables

Jump-Location

Install Jump-Location (autojump for PS) and navigate faster on the file-system. Seriously, I don’t understand how I lived without it.

Jump-Location

Do .NET calls directly from PowerShell

PowerShell use .NET (CLR and DLR) and well-integrated with it.

Here is a quick demo for a bug in System.Type.GetType(String), that I explored recently. System.Type.GetType("System.Func`10") must return a generic type Func`10, but it returns null.

GetType

Look how simple you can call .NET APIs! Again, you have intellisense for them. More importent, there is no need to compile anything or create a project to test it out. It’s like a REPL for C#.

Conclusion

If you are a windows developer (especially .NET developer), PowerShell should be in your tool arsenal. It’s a rich terminal and scripting language, highly inspired by unix terminals like bash and zsh.