PowerShell, Windows Vista Ultimate Extras and WLM 8.1
The original post was titled Ultimate Extras vs PowerShell as I felt a little cheated seeing Hold'Em Poker ship before Windows PowerShell but I jumped the gun a bit. PowerShell 1.0 for Vista is available for download!.
While the Windows Vista launch went by with less buzz and fanfare than expected there's certainly been enough Vista related releases to keep one busy.
Ultimate Extras
With the Windows launch day the first Windows Vista Ultimate Extras were released via Windows Update today. Like Kevin Harder I've been waiting for to see what Ultimate Extras treats were since I installed Vista and have been dissappointed everytime I checked for these updates and found nothing.
But now the new Extras are available and they are:
Now this is all good and well - I like Hold 'Em Poker and can see myself playing this quite a bit (it's already kept me busy a while this evening) but none of the Extras are really something for a developer to write home about.
PowerShell
What I would REALLY like to see is the Vista installer team spending some time on getting PowerShell out the door and available to Vista users. Scratch that - Hey ho, what do you know - As promised Windows PowerShell 1.0 for Windows Vista is available for download!
While Windows PowerShell 1.0 for XP and 2003 have been available for a while, delays waiting for the Vista installer team has delayed the PowerShell release until now. It sounds like bad planning on Microsoft's side as the only difference between the Vista release and the other versions were with the installer. What makes this worse is that if I remember correctly PowerShell was originally intended as the replacement command shell for Windows Longhorn/Vista and to see it ship this late is really sorry. But that's all water under the bridge now and Vista users can now happily rejoin the ranks of PowerShell users.
After you've installed Windows PowerShell you'd want to check out these great PowerShell tools as well:
Windows Live Messenger 8.1
Windows Live Messenger 8.1 is finally out of beta and available for download. Hopefully all the stability issues on Vista has been resolved as I'm sure the consumer market won't be as forgiving as the people currently battling with WLM on Vista. (And there's always Yahoo! Live Messenger, designed from the ground up for Vista) [Link via Omar Shahine]