Posted On: Tuesday, 13 February 2007 by Rajiv Popat

A couple of months ago I had to make a difficult choice. A choice between Vista and Powershell (I still need time getting used to this name:)). Vista had officially RTM'ed and Powershell for Vista wasn't available. It was a difficult choice - wait on XP/2003 and continue to use Powershell or Move to Vista and wait for Powershell to become Vista Ready. I decided to move to Vista.

Recently, after about a couple of months, exactly as promised by Jeffrey Snover, the Moand team has Vista'ed the Powershell Installer and that means I can have both Vista and Powershell now. To add to that, I can totally continue to Skin Powershell and make it look beautiful, just like my Vista. And that's very important! Right? :)

I've been playing a lot with Powershell and now I think it's time for me, to put it to some real use, in project deployments on QA / Production.

One of the problems I always had while writing anything about PowerShell is that there are just too many good things to talk about in there and almost anything that could have been written about, has been written by someone else. That's one of the reasons (excuses? :)) why I haven't been writing a lot about it. For now, I'm just going to start by talking a little bit about XML and how you can read XML files in Powershell.

Let's just assume that we have the following simple XML file which lets me run various Uninstall and Install SQL scripts on the database depending on the Application version that I am pushing to the server.