When I was at the Windows 2008 R2 release there was a ton of new information that was talked about. There are all new management tools for Windows 2008 R2. In fact there is an all new methology within Microsoft when it comes to building the management tools.
The old methodology is to build the management tool, then build some command line apps which can do the same thing. This has left holes in the command line tools where there are things you can’t do in the command line but you can do in the Management Tools.
The new methodology is to build the powershell applets, then when they are done put a management interface on top of them. This way the management interface can do everything that the powershell applets can do and vice versa. This also allows for the admin to be able to script everything that the managment interface can do.
The down side to all this powershell is that there’s a new thing to learn. The up side is that there’s a new tool for editing powershell scripts which will help make life easier on you. This is the actually comes with Powershell v2. It gives you tab completion and with Windows 2008 giving you tons more applets this is an extremely powerful tool for administration. The biggest new feature with Windows 2008 R2’s powershell (in my opinion at least) is that you can now run powershell applets on remote servers. This will come in very handy in the next post where we talk about some of the changes in Windows 2008 Core mode.
Denny
