Windows Management Framework V5 Preview

If they could make Windows actually POSIX compliant and have a proper shell it would be a massive step forward for the platform.

It's not that Windows is different, but that Windows is just plain broken and there's heaps of hacks on top of that to try and deal with the awful design. PowerShell is an attempt to fix CMD which is an attempt to fix batch files and the feeble CPM inspired command prompt.

This is MSYS (not 2). The web presence of MSYS/MinGW has always been poorly designed. Hopefully it will get better with MSYS2.

I've installed it recently using info from: http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20installation/

It has a port of pacman (!) from Arch Linux for package managing. It feels so much better than mingw-get (package manager used for MSYS/MinGW).

Yes, pacman is wonderful. We're very grateful to the Arch Linux devs.

You guys are all correct, we've not paid nearly enough attention to marketing. Here's the description I tried to post:

MSYS2 is an updated, modern version of MSYS, both of which are Cygwin (POSIX compatibility layer) forks with the aim of better interoperability with native Windows software.

The name is a contraction of Minimal SYStem 2, and aims to provide support to facilitate using the bash shell, Autotools, revision control systems and the like for building native Windows applications using MinGW-w64 toolchains.

We wanted a package management system to provide easy installation of packages, and ported Arch Linux's pacman. This brings many powerful features such as dependency resolution and simple complete system upgrades, as well as providing the build system (makepkg) which is used to make these packages. The set of software-building recipes (PKGBUILDs) for MSYS2 itself are at:

https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages

.. and those for MinGW-w64 (i.e. native Windows software) are at:

https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages

Both 32 and 64bit are supported.

You should do it. I worked with PowerShell a few years ago and it was much better experience than shell scripting with bash or tcsh or others. Things I liked:

You get an IDE for free. It's quite usable out of the box and it's really nice for learning the language.

It's less reliant on punctuation. There are a few special symbols and they are highly regular in their usage. Syntax feels more readable (to me) than that of bash thanks to this.

You deal with objects. You can reflect on them (great for exploration), call methods on them, while still having generic ways for composing them and manipulating in large quantities. Yet the language itself is not object oriented, which makes it much simpler than it would be otherwise.

You get the whole .NET to use. Or most of it. You can basically instantiate and use any .NET class (and COM objects and other such things) without hassle.

There are a few concepts in the language which unify many concepts from the system. For example you can "cd" into a directory or a key in the registry or a network share or any number of other things which can be thought of as a listable resource.

This is coming from a programmer, so it's missing things probably important for sysadmins, like security management and built in process of signing and verifying scripts signatures before running them.

One think I didn't like: it was slow. The other: nothing worked on it (I mean things like python's virtualenv, which comes with .bat file, but not with .ps1 file), even Visual Studio command prompt. I ended up writing some PowerShell code for translating cmd.exe variables to PS ones.

And, of course, it's Microsoft, so forget about running it somewhere else. But, all in all, if you have to script something in Windows, it's by far better than any other tool.

Agree entirely. However from an architectural POV, Asp.net has always been a pile of crap because everything is abstract classes and sealed ones at that. Virtually impossible to reliably test. Interfaces? Never! Even System.Web.Abstractions stinks.

Having written a view engine, security frameworks, NH session management stuff, 100+ complicated controllers, action filters galore and thrown it into MVC I've come to not appreciate it very much.

And don't get me started on Razor. Buffered rendering for layouts (bye bye RAM), batshit source, obtuse and non orthogonal syntax, poor runtime integration, absolutely no separation of logic and code.

I'm ready to move on.

Edit: just to add, I'm really liking Java's design by committee approach these days. It's incredibly clear that you need a lot of opinions to build a correct and well engineered solution. With .Net in general, it's served up to customers ike a soup kitchen. Occasionally we're left without soup though (WF3, Silverlight, early EF versions, WCF fragmentation, razor and so forth). The majority of the praise comes from people subjected to WebForms for years or even Telerik circa 2006 at the worst.