PowerShell V3 – Finding What’s New?

So I’ve started to play around with PowerShell V3 and outside of some neat IDE stuff in ISE, where do I get started? Well I guess the best spot is to start with what new cmdlets have been added? So let’s do a little comparison.

The first problem we run in to is that PowerShell V3 is an update and not a side by side install. Not a horrible problem since we can start PowerShell in compatibility mode

PowerShell -Version 2

This will only work with the console and not ISE. So lets load that up and do the following.

Get-Command | Export-Clixml ps2cmds.cli

Now that we’ve exported all the cmdlets (and alias and functions) from PS2 lets hop in to PS3 and compare the two.

$v2 = Import-Clixml ps2cmds.cli

$v3 = Get-Command

#filter it to only cmdlets for now - CommandType 8 is cmdlet

$v2cmd = $v2 | where { $_.CommandType -eq 8}

$v3cmd = $v3 | where {$_.CommandType -eq 8}

$newcmds = Compare-Object $v2cmd $v3cmd -Property Name -PassThru

$newcmds.count

#should return 351, or at least it did for me

$newcmds | sort module,name | ft name,module

You’ll notice a few things when running this. First you’ll see that a lot of modules are automatically loaded now. I believe this is done because of the confusion with AD modules and people not knowing they needed to load them first. Secondly you’ll notice there are some cool new modules like CimCmdlets, PSSCheduledJob and PSWorkflow. One other thing to take a peek at is the new core PowerShell cmdlets.

$newcmds | where {$_.module -eq $null}

There are a few here that stand out, for example Get-ControlPanelItem, Unblock-File and Show-Command. The Show-Command is a pretty neat way to explore PowerShell. Basically creates a pop-up window that lets you dig through the cmdlets a little easier.

So many new things to play around with!