My Powershell set up, Part 1 of 2

This posting gives an overview how I have set up Powershell on my workstation.

Any heavy shell user normally customizes his (or her) environment. These environments are (and will likely always be) a work in progress. As you learn things and write additional functions to help you with your tasks, your environment will grow and change. I find that I am tweaking things even as a I write this posting.

Aside: One of the things that I am forever tweaking is function names. I try to follow the Powershell verb-noun convention, but there are lots of spots where I have had to make judgment calls. It's not hard to find inconsistencies. For example, I vacillate between "Report", "List" and "Get". I'm not crazy about Get. My issue with Get is that it seems that Get should return an object and be used like this:

$result = Get-Thingy
$result.MemberFunction $param
$result = $null

whereas I run a lot of stuff that just returns information.

A 'Report' is usually more complicated than a simple 'List', which is often a single column.

What's better "Invoke-SQLQuery" or "Get-SQLResults"?

Anyway, let's get back on track.

Firstly, I am still running Powershell V1.0. I haven't spent any time with the Powershell 2.0 CTP, though I have read a few introductory articles on new features. I have had issues with other Microsoft CTPs in the past and I'm loathe to install something on a 'production' computer that I might have a hard time removing. I am also dismayed with the decision to not support remote execution under Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. None of my clients have deployed Vista on more than a handful of workstations, and none of them have even started looking at Windows Server 2008. They will not being doing so just to run Powershell.

Secondly, I use Powertab. Powertab provides pop-up help for functions and files, just by hitting the tab key.

Thirdly, I use the Powershell Community Extensions (PSCX). PSCX provides lots of small, handy functions.

Lastly, my profile consists of several files, with various functions (and associated aliases) broken out by functionality. I have two reasons for breaking them out. The first reason is that my original profile was getting very large. My main profile is over 79 KB right now. The second reason is that I try to break out stuff that is specific to a client and not useful anywhere else.

Next time, I will go into some detail on how my profile works.