Get-PowerShell Andy Schneider's Blog about Windows PowerShell

There has been a lot of talk in the last couple weeks about using WPF to build UI's for Powershell. Just to name a few

Powershell Team's Series on WPF

Joel Bennet's Huddled Masses Series on WPF

I think this is great and I can't wait to see what we all come up with.

As we begin to build these graphical tools on top of Powershell, UI and user experience is going to be more and more important.

There is a great presentation over on dnrTV (Dot Net Rocks TV) where Mark Miller and Carl Franklin discuss the Science of Great User Experience. There are some really good nuggets in here that even as Powershell Scripters tweaking WPF, we can think about and use.

Also, if you are developer and use Visual Studio, you really should check out Dev Express's CodeRush. This is the company that Mark works for and they really take User Experience for Visual Studio to the next level. It's awesome.

One of the biggest features of PS V2 is the ability to do remoting. It's great to be able to run a ScriptBlock against a bunch of computers.

In the first version of the CTP, one issue I had was that I couldn't tell which object came from which computer.

It looks like CTP2 has a resolution to this. They tack on a ComputerName property to objects that are returned from a remote connection.

Notice that if I do a get-process on a local computer there is no ComputerName attribute.

However, if I get an object back from a remote system I can get a ComputerName attribute.

I am using the icm alias for the invoke-command cmdlet against a runspace that has 3 remote computers, Powershell-dev1, Powershell-dev2, and Powershell-dev3.

What I think would be nice is to have ComputerName be a default property that gets displayed automatically when you list a remote object. That way you wouldn't have to explicitly use select object or format-table/format-list to see the attribute.