Lee Holmes is a PowerShell god! He’s also a nice guy…he posted a comment on my Monad Rocks! entry. In this blog, he shows how to add instant scripting to a .NET application using 6 lines of code and PowerShell. How crazy is that?!

Once again, the implication are staggering! Since PowerShell understands .NET objects directly, you simply create an object representing the scripting API to your application, host a shell instance and voila! Granted, PowerShell is for serious power users and you might not want to expose those capabilities by default, but when you need power that a GUI can’t provide, PowerShell is where it’s at!

On most large embedded devices (routers, telecom switches, etc…) you often have a management interface you can plug into. This interface allows you to do things a normal user doesn’t care about. Things like display a list of significant events, an audit trail for user transactions, display the live connections, etc…

Those capabilities help tremendously when the customer (AT&T, MCI, …) calls the telephone switch Manufacturer (Lucent, Alcatel, Nortel) at 3AM and is screaming that his phone switch is not putting calls through. If you think the Internet service providers and related agencies (CERT, etc…) respond quickly to an outage/virus, you clearly have not been around a “Fast Response Team” from the major telephony players. Those guys are awesome, but they have the (hidden) tools to diagnose and fix the problem, thanks to these administrative consoles.

A PowerShell interface could be one of those secret tools - for your own application. Awesome!