The Windows PowerShell Team is pleased to release the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows PowerShell 2.0!

This release provides a “sneak peak” into the future, including key features that empower Windows administrators to: Run commands on a remote computer, or better, against N other computers. Use the new PSJob cmdlets to start remote jobs and retrieve the results, either individually or in-aggregate! Write real cmdlets in PowerShell script itself! Internationalize your scripts and their output, not to mention debugging those same scripts!

This CTP release helps developers to more easily layer their runtime or GUI on top of PowerShell, leveraging its cmdlets and remoting infrastructure. It includes APIs to create and use a pool of Runspaces (engines) to run cmdlets. This release also presents very early looks at Restricted Runspaces (the ability to declare a script, cmdlet or variable public or private) and the Graphical PowerShell (a script editor and a Unicode-enabled console). These are just a few of the new features I think are interesting in Windows PowerShell 2.0 CTP. Additionally this CTP includes some simple updates... like new parameters to select-string (Context, AllMatches, NotMatch and Encoding) and new operators like –split and -join!

Last but certainly not least, V2 builds upon Windows PowerShell 1.0 by providing backward compatibility – your 1.0 cmdlets and scripts will run on this CTP (with the exceptions noted in the Release Notes - mostly new keywords/cmdlets). If a working 1.0 script doesn’t run on V2 and is not in the known list of exceptions, please tell us about it!

Selected New Features in Windows PowerShell 2.0 CTP
(Please refer to Release Notes and Help topics for more details)

• What's New in CTP of PowerShell 2.0