Remote PowerShell

Let me start off by saying I’m just a another software developer that likes to get the most out of his tools/platform. Therefore, when I’m developing on a Windows platform I never leave home without PowerShell. It’s so ridiculously delicious sometimes I slap myself in disbelief. With PowerShell v2 there were many improvements to an already excellent v1. One of which was Remote Commands using Sessions.

With this post, I’m definitely not going to go into details about Sessions as I really don’t get down that way. I’m also not here to convince anyone to use PowerShell, even if it’s the best shell I’ve come across on any platform. This post is simply being done to call attention to the PowerShell community leaders. You have an ace in your hand here and I’m not sure why people like me don’t know about it.

I use PowerShell for many development related task, many of which reside on remote machines. Since, for the most part Windows lacks a native remote shell environment (telnet, ssh, etc), I usually would terminal into the machine I needed to perform some tasks on, open up PowerShell and be one my way. This worked fine for the most part, but a developer can wish for more. What I really wanted was to be able to open up a telnet like session and run my commands.

I recently found that there is something similar. While it’s not a full on command terminal session (telnet) it is pretty darn useful and will help with a majority of the tasks I perform on remote machines.

Enter-PSSession - Starts an interactive session with a remote computer.

This translates to giving you an interactive prompt on the remote machine. Priceless!

I recognize that as a developer I might be a minority of the PowerShell user base and would imagine the IT crowd is the majority. This could also be a case where I just missed the boat and the vast majority of the community already knows (AND uses) these Remote Sessions. I’m OK with that and thankful that I finally stumbled upon them as they will prove to save me many hours of work.

However, if this is the case where there might be more people like me out there that are oblivious to Remote Commands, I think the evangelists have an opportunity to fill that potential void, resulting in a happier, more productive kid with a toy.

Wish -> I cannot seem to run an editor like vim in the session to edit files on the remote machine). This would be double awesome if made possible.

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I'm a software geek living and working in Boulder, Colorado. Follow me on Twitter; you'll dig my tweets if you're into that sort of thing.

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