Network administrators, power users, and command line junkies can rejoice. Windows PowerShell has been released. PowerShell offers users of Windows an advanced shell interface for maintaining Windows computers, including servers. It offers a host of improvements over the old style command shell, and it is nice to see that many common Unix shell commands work as well(sort of).

PowerShell is available for Windows XP SP2, and 2003 server. However, noticeably missing from the list is a version for Vista. It is an odd thing that Microsoft’s much vaunted next operating system, which is complete, is apparently at this time not supported.

The download is available at the Microsoft PowerShell Download. Note, there are a number of complaints of the download site not working correctly. When I first tried to download it couldn’t find the download site. I went back and tried again and that time it worked. Just keep trying if at first it doesn’t work.