PowerShell 006 – WMF v5 and OneGet

Windows Management Framework v5 Preview

WMF V5

Jeffrey Snover posted an announcement of the WMF V5 preview on the Windows Server Blog. The post and a download link to get the new bits is here.

There are a few very interesting pieces here and it is another step in the growth of the framework and PowerShell. I’m personally a little unsure of the reach and extension of the framework into realms ‘unmanaged’ or out of the control of Microsoft. When software vendors provide their modules they take responsibility, with the WFM V5 and especially the OneGet functionality the line is a bit blurred. Who is responsible if OneGet isn’t working? MSFT? Chocolatey? other source providers? At the end of the day, OneGet is pretty cool.

OneGet

From the Windows Server Blog “OneGet is a new way to discover and install software packages from around the Internet. It will simplify the acquisition of all kinds of software and make installation and discovery ‘easy peasy’ as they say.

Much of the OneGet capability is very interesting. I have a few areas that cause me some concern. I’m am willing to be convinced so I’ll spend some time checking it out.  After I setup WMF 5 this morning I used the Get-Command cmdlet to find the OneGet cmdlets. After I found the basics I ran;

PS C:\> Find-Package |Export-csv packages.csv

This first informed me that it needed to retrieve NuGet Package Manager. It then gave me a list of all of the packages available via the provider Chocolatey. There are roughly 1750 packages today (4/4/2014). I wanted to learn more so I decided to check to see if my help files were up to date.

PS C:\> update-help

Uh Oh! update-help throws an error when grabbing help on the ‘OneGet’ and ‘NetworkSwitch’ Modules. Honestly not a great place to start but it is preview! So, learning what parameters are required, mandatory, allow for wildcards etc. may have to wait a bit. Or I can just sit at my computer for hours trying different things!

I did look through my .csv file and found Notepad++ and I decided to set that up.

PS C:\> Install-Package -Name notepadplusplus

After a brief warning about the package not being marked as safe and me ignoring the warning, it downloaded any dependencies and installed the package. Pretty cool if you ask me.

NetworkSwitch

Last year at TechEd I ran into Jeffrey between sessions and had a chance to catch up. Jeffrey is an incredibly accessible guy and so enthusiastic. Just a great person to chat with. I have a few great Jeffrey Snover stories from some projects I had the pleasure of working while at Microsoft, but those are for a different post <G>. During that brief discussion Jeffrey shared with me how one of his visions around Desired State Configuration (DSC) was managing switches, well… here we are! Read through the Windows Server Blog announcement on WMF v5 Preview to learn more about this capability.