How do you use PowerShell?

Question

Windows PowerShell came out last year and got great reviews from many .net bloggers (Hanselman comes to mind). It seemed to be touted as a great new utility that somehow made everything that you would ever do on the command line easier, and integrated with .Net. However, the more I read about it, the more it seems to be a tool that is great for IT professionals, and not much use for developers.

Do you use PowerShell in your dev work? If so, how? Is it worth learning?

Note: After seeing the responses so far, I think it is valid to conclude that PowerShell can be very useful to a .Net developer. However, there is no one answer below that I can label as the answer (so please forgive me for not doing so). I am voting up each answer that I have found helpful.

Answer 1

It seems to me that WPS is a way to make your life easier to do the things you need. I don't think your going to find WPS integrated into say FireFox or Quicken but those teams may use it to do those things....in short "WPS doesn't make your program, WPS makes making your program easier." ;o)

Answer 2

@EdSwangren - If you have to work primarily on a Windows platform and work in the .NET space, I would whole-heartedly recommend putting the time in to learn PowerShell. It can leverage your existing .NET experience and code, works with COM, WMI, and ADSI. It allows you access to just about everything on the Windows platform (and that's just V1). V2 is under active development (CTP2 is available now) and will include more remoting, STA threading, and many other improvements.

Many vendors are also supporting PowerShell - from /n Software providing networking cmdlets, to Citrix and VMWare providing management api's via PowerShell.