Windows Management Framework V5 Preview

http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2014/04/03/windows-management-framework-v5-preview.aspx

by petval • 12 years ago

126 63 12 years ago

blogs.technet.com

petval• 12 years ago

for example Install Sysinternals from PowerShell via OneGet http://www.thomasmaurer.ch/2014/04/install-sysinternals-from...

mands• 12 years ago

I wonder how this compares to PsGet (http://psget.net) - or is it simply a cmd-line wrapper around Chocolatey?

jon-wood• 12 years ago

Yup, the article explicitly says that the first built in repository is Chocolatey, but I assume it can be extended to support other sources as well.

shanselman5• 12 years ago

It's a plugin, but a cleanroom implementation of the protocol and file format of Chocolatey. It's not shelling out. They are side by side and compatible.

NicoJuicy6• 12 years ago

This is actually pretty awesome. I liked package managers (using linux and Windows on dualboot), one of the best tools for Windows is Cygwin (using Linux commands in Windows).. Where i can automate a lot of (manual) work.

It seems to me that Microsoft is going all-in on open-source and flexibility.

If you are using Asp.Net, you should check out Owin and project Helios - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2014/02/18/introducin...

mattmanser4• 12 years ago

/ranty

Ahhh, Owin and Helios perhaps explain why the ASP.Net team are starting to feel like they are losing the plot.

Trying to put any of their new stuff into existing projects is a complete nightmare. Their new features are inflexible and brittle. WebAPI feels alien. Routing is getting more and more complicated instead of simpler.

And the new APIs just 'feel' wrong, as if they've been written by programmers who don't understand HTTP, javascript or the web. Programmers who haven't used apis on the web and know which ones are a joy to use and which ones are a nightmare. Programmers who don't seem to realize there a new javascript MVC hotness every week. Programmers who don't seem to understand that their javascript folders are never called '~/Scripts'. That 'S' still offends me.

Everything has to be done just so, their way. It's not flexible at all, things break all over the place. They've decided to adopt the zealot interpretation of REST, which doesn't work. The OData implementation is hard to step into and feels half-finished.

It's getting back to the bad old days where if you want to touch the pipeline at all ASP.Net gets angry and sulks in a corner. They're going back to their old 'MS knows best' model, where they can't trust programmers to choose their own (much, much better) practices. I wouldn't be surprised if they soon decide to start calling spans labels again because after all isn't that much clearer?

And it turns out it's because they've just given up on existing code base. Never a good sign.

I really just want ASP.Net Membership fixed to be super simple and not overengineered, the Request object to be fixed so I can get at the raw request when I need to without jumping through pre-generic collections, the cruft associated with the webform pipeline nuked and for no-one to ever, ever mention WCF to me ever again.

Oh and for-the-love-of-god stop trying to force a shitty URL/API structure down my throat and hiding the routing in totally different files.

I love C#, I am starting to seriously hate ASP.Net again. MVC 1 freed us, every subsequent release of MVC seems to smother, not liberate.

shanselman5• 12 years ago

MVC5 uses AttributeRouting. Just put the routing on the controllers. No need for a routing table. (or routes.rb ;) )

ASP.Net Identity 2 is just that, easy and extensible membership.

Owin requests also give you what you're asking for also.

Don't like the S, change it? lowercaseroutes=true.

;)

Oh, and just to be snarky, the "programmers who don't understand HTTP" were lead by Henrik Nielsen, author of the HTTP spec, used to work for Tim Berners-Lee. ;)

NicoJuicy6• 12 years ago

I actually haven't met anyone who thought like you.

WebApi feels great and respects the HTTP spec (PUT, DELETE, UPDATE, POST,GET) and even the OData spec is compliant and after all, it's very fast to implement WebAPI and OData.

The .Net (mostly Asp.Net) is evolving fast for technologies like SignalR en OWIN.. And actually that's great.

You could still use webforms if you want, but i woudn't recommend that.

Most people hate change, but considering the (positive[subjective]) changes, they have done.. I think it's awesome and liberating.

OWIN has a improved authentication implementation, which has been a long requested feature for Asp.Net. For example, when you wanted to customize the Authentication implementation (don't remember the interface), you had to implement all of the methods (ForgetPass, EmailPass, ...). OWIN fixes that also (which was hard because of their former implementation)!

The only way it seems like more hassle/mess, is because there are more DLL's being imported, but i don't care because i know the reason behind it :)

bananas• 12 years ago

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.

teh_klev• 12 years ago

If you use Cygwin a lot, you should check out MobaXTerm:

http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

The Pro edition is pretty sweet.

NicoJuicy6• 12 years ago

I actually use cygwin a lot for stuff like ImageMagick, ssh key generation and wget (putty for terminals).

I think mobaxterm would be overkill for me (but i bookmarked it either way :))

bbradley406• 12 years ago

At my school I frequently need to use Windows PCs, and having MobaXTerm on a flashdrive has been incredibly useful (installing Cygwin every time would be impractical). It is very powerful, and has a plugin system if you need some extra feature.

claar3• 12 years ago

If you like Cygwin and Package Managers, checkout the wonderful Cyg-Apt: https://code.google.com/p/cyg-apt/

kasabali2• 12 years ago

apt-cyg seems more widely used. Are there any advantages cyg-apt offers, or is it just another alternative?

callesgg• 12 years ago

While I myself wold newer use windows for anything unless there was no other way, I hope that the stuff that Microsoft is doing might influence some windows people to start doing stuff the "right" way.

Already__Taken2• 12 years ago

Much of this stuff is coming from the Azure people working with the Puppet and Chef people to get the tools needed into windows via powershell I guess.

angrybits2• 12 years ago

The phrase "the right way" always makes me chuckle a bit. We all seem to know what it is, yet we seldom agree on it. My first 10 years of programming was spent working on a system built on Windows. First ASP/COM and then later ASP.net -- and that thing practically printed money. Did we build it "the right way"? No, certainly not. But our stock options didn't seem to notice, and at the end of the day, that is what matters to me.

rbanffy• 12 years ago

The phrase "the right way" always makes me chuckle a bit

Here, outside Windowsland, we have been using package management for more than a decade and, after that long, I'd suppose we have it pretty much nailed down. There are still some different ideas and approaches (different dependency management schemes, pre-compiled vs. locally compiled, ports), but I'd guess we get it right most of the time. The "right way" is a tricky concept, but, seriously, this is all very mature by now.

asdfaoeu• 12 years ago

I realise its a Microsoft article. But they really couldn't have a fallback monospace font?

gnoway• 12 years ago

Am I reading correctly that this is a 2012R2-specific feature? Thanks, but what am I supposed to do for the rest of my Windows infrastructure?

shanselman5• 12 years ago

No, I'm using it on 8.1 now.

Already__Taken2• 12 years ago

WMF 4.0 with PS 4.0 and DSC etc are available down to windows 7 I imagine this will be the same.

j_s3• 12 years ago

This is WMF 5.0, so the business side at MS could easily decide to drop support for earlier Windows versions that 8.1/2012R2 - I doubt there's any technical limitation though.

clemsen• 12 years ago

I have been using Chocolatey for a while now without any regret. OneGet probably won't match apt-get at first but this step is definitively in the right direction. If all software providers would provide their repository information updating programs would finally be a one-klick (or one command)-operation.

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

Chocolatey is absolutely essential for a smoother Windows experience. That said, it still feels like a hack (hardly surprising), but it's nonetheless an invaluable one.

avenger1233• 12 years ago

I use Chocolatey quite a bit now and can definitely agree with the hack aspect of it. It's not always clear when a package will need your input (since they couldn't automate that part) but for the most part it works.

I am hoping that since package management is now an official Microsoft effort, a large gain will be to address these "hacks".

The long term potential of this is that enterprise can build their own repository and push changes out as they wish. This would be the real value. Also, companies that already provide package/software deployment solutions will now have another tool to help them do this.

untog• 12 years ago

Almost a meta comment, but Microsoft seems to be knocking their BUILD conference out of the park this year. I think we've already seen more notable announcements and improvements than we'll see at WWDC.

Just the fact that there was a talk about developing iOS apps by the founder of Xamarin is telling. The fact that he was wearing Google Glass is another...

duaneb2• 12 years ago

Yes, things are looking healthy for Microsoft's developer reputation. Now if only they implemented C99 and full POSIX....

astrodust• 12 years ago

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.

kasabali2• 12 years ago

You know Microsoft had a POSIX subsystem in Windows not long ago, right? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754351.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

0x420• 12 years ago

This is cool. I'm a *nix guy but this actually compels me to learn PowerShell for those rare occasions when I'm working on a Windows machine.

klibertp• 12 years ago

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.

manojlds• 12 years ago

"cd" into a directory or key in registry.

You might be interested in my little project redditps - https://github.com/manojlds/redditps

I wrote it to mainly highlight such cool features of Powershell.

RayDonnelly3• 12 years ago

If you like your FOSS I can recommend MSYS2.

http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2

(disclaimer: I work on MSYS2)

gerbal• 12 years ago

Some description of the project (really any description) would make me alot more comfortable downloading MSYS2. As it stands, I have no idea what this project is, what it does, or even what the software license is.

It's a personal preference, but having the code mirrored on a Github repo would be awesome too.

claar3• 12 years ago

I'm a *nix/FOSS guy with 15+ years of experience.

I spent a couple minutes trying to figure out what MSYS2 was from the project page/the project wiki/Google, and then just gave up.

Really, a single sentence on the summary page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2 and the wiki at http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/Home/ would go a long way.

For anyone else in the same boat, I assume this is a replacement for MSYS, which according to http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS, is a "collection of GNU utilities such as bash, make, gawk and grep to allow building of applications and programs which depend on traditionally UNIX tools to be present."

avenger1233• 12 years ago

It looks to be a package manager for mingw packages:

http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS

At a minimum, they should just put a URL to the above.

j_s3• 12 years ago

This is the info I find after searching a bit:

http://msys2.github.io/

http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20installation/

Seems like a bit of marketing is in order!

camus2• 12 years ago

can i distribute sources or do I have to compile them first? can somebody download compile my sources without having to download visual studio?

sequoia• 12 years ago

As a long time on-and-off chocolatey user: YAY!!!

I prefer *nix but at work I need to use Windows sometimes, Chocolatey is a HUGE step in the right direction. It boggled my mind that MSFT wasn't throwing money behind the project- it does loads to make Windows friendlier to developers who prefer CLI.

I hope they commit a person/team to evaluating/maintaining/cleaning up packages in the Chocolatey repo.

One question I have tho is why they don't just adopt Chocolatey/cinst (chocolatey install) directly? What's the purpose of get-command (besides ownership which is obviously important). Why not just fork/rebrand chocolatey? Or is that what's happening?

j_s3• 12 years ago

Yes, Chocolatey has a lot of volunteer-maintained packages that have gone stale; official Microsoft support will pressure software developers to publish up-to-date packages.

This is good news for Chocolately, which should be able to support these packages even on older versions of Windows.

AlexC04• 12 years ago

I'd love it if they added console tabs and text reflow / resizing to powershell

I use PS all the time - and it's killing me that I need 4+ windows open to account for all the different projects I've got to work on at the same time.

jamesgeck0• 12 years ago

I've been using ConEmu just for the tabs. You can even have Powershell open in some tabs and PuTTY open in others (although that's a bit of a pain to set up).

I really don't like the default ConEmu configuration, but it's flexible enough that you can make it do just about anything if you poke at it enough.

kaelspencer• 12 years ago

I agree. It's a big pain point for me. I've been using ConEmu recently which supports resizing and has tabs (among many other features). My favorite other feature is the tasks: you can define a set of steps to run as a task, then launch that task in a new tab.

https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

Windows Management Framework V5 Preview

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