So you’re starting to get the hang of this PowerShell stuff and are able to pull off your own fancy tricks with the builtin cmdlets, but you need more! You want to be able to do things like create computer accounts, get VMware host information or turn on Cisco UCS and HP blades, cool stuff! Well, there is a way and that way is PowerShell modules.

PowerShell modules come in two types, script modules (.psm1 files) and binary dll files. Not long from now you will be creating your own modules but if you would like to get a head start on that I suggest the MSDN topic, it has everything you ever wanted to know on modules.

This idea comes from one of the awesome engineers I work with, Chris Tester. We’ve recently updated our laptops to Windows 8.1 and Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have removed the old Windows Experience Index page. Not that WEI was anything fantastic but it did give a nice easy way to compare computers without having to go through installing a third-party testing package. I can only speculate that they thought it would be a bad idea to show this on tablets? Or did the OEMs not like it?

When PowerShell 3.0 was released one of the little “surprises” was that the help included in the download was a short stub. If you wanted the full help available in your PowerShell session then you need to use the cmdlet Update-Help. While i’ve now gotten over the shock (I’ve adapted to just using Google) it is still important to find out what is changing in the documentation.

With that in mind I suggest you pop on down to Richard Siddaway’s blog and use the link provided to put into your RSS reader of choice. It never hurts to keep an eye on what they are up to over at MSHQ.

This post is less of a tip and more of a general warning. As someone who does a fair bit of work with PowerShell, I’m always anxious to get my hands on the latest release. But this is a caution to really read the release notes as it turns out new PowerShell versions are quite incompatible with a fair few core Microsoft technologies (e.g. Exchange). This is very unfortunate and has been the case since PowerShell/WMF 3.

Have you got a nice New-Alias setup you wish were available every time you opened PowerShell? How about a cool function you’ve written that you’d like to not have to import at the start of each session? Well the PowerShell profile is for you! This little text file will allow you to put pretty much any PowerShell command in it and have it run every time you open a new PowerShell window. Think of it is the Windows equivalent of a Linux .bash_profile or .zshrc.