When working with Windows systems across an enterprise, the question often arises: “How do I do <some task> in PowerShell?” In an administrator’s perfect world, anybody who designs a feature with management implications also supports (via PowerShell cmdlets) the tasks that manage that feature. Many management tasks have been around longer than PowerShell, though, so the answer can sometimes be,
“The same way you did it before PowerShell.”
That’s not to say that your life as an administrator doesn’t improve with the introduction of PowerShell, however. PrePowerShell administration tasks generally fall into one of several models: commandline utilities, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interaction, registry manipulation, file manipulation, interaction with COM objects, or interaction with .NET objects.
PowerShell makes it easier to interact with all these task models, and therefore makes it easier to manage functionality that depends on them.
