PowerShell - Distributed Solution

Question

I am new to PS, so I may be mistaken in some terminology.

If you want to deploy a PowerShell user environment (snap-in) for a team of 30 database developers / administrators. What is the best way to do this ... if you plan to deploy new functionality once a week? Does PowerShell 2.0 help in this regard?

Assumption:
There is no problem with everyone in the team installing PowerShell (v1 or v2)

Update : Also see Jeffrey Snower's answer about v2 below.

Answer 1

To a certain extent, this will depend on the type of functional changes that you intend to make. For our environment, we deploy a fairly standard PS installation, and then add one line for each profile to run the script from a shared folder on the server. Then in this script I can do any setup that I want to apply to everyone.

We add a line to the MS profile of a particular machine (the one in% Windir%), it was a deliberate choice. We do this so that users essentially only get it on their production boxes. Thus, when they write something, they can quickly enter the test field and run the script to make sure that the script will be deployed without dependencies on these settings.

Currently the settings are pretty mundane. Basically, only some additional features and aliases. I also have a journal that I wrote in C # specifically for powershell, so it loads this from a DLL located in the same network folder.

Since I communicate with my environment so much, I have it in my profile :)

$ProfileDir = ([System.IO.Directory]::GetParent($profile)).FullName $localMSProfile = "$PShome\Microsoft.Powershell_profile.ps1" $localAllProfile = "$PShome\profile.ps1" $userAllProfile = "$ProfileDir\profile.ps1" $userMSProfile = "$ProfileDir\Microsoft.Powershell_profile.ps1" $allProfiles = ($localAllProfile, $localMSProfile, $userAllProfile, $userMSProfile) 

Answer 2

That's why we added MODULE support to PowerShell V2, the easiest mechanism for xcopy to deploy feature sets. The module documentation is pretty simple right now, but in a month or two it should be much better.

Experiment! Enjoy it! Engage!

Jeffrey Sverver [MSFT] Windows Management Project Architect

Answer 3

If you launch a new version of the snap-in weekly, the switch version probably will not help in this part of the thing. However, you will be developing a new platform with the benefit of the advanced functionality that comes with it.

As already mentioned, some scenarios can ease the pain of deployment to such an extent that you need to do nothing but properly maintain these scripts and continue to create new assemblies.