This week we had an announcement that PowerShell has been released as an open source project and is available on some Linux platforms as well as OSX. I was actually talking with someone else that had been informed prior to the MS announcement, and they told me to go to github.com/powershell/powershell. I first I thought I was getting some inside information. However this is a public site, obviously updated and released in time for the announcement, so no NDAs were harmed this week.

I have an Ubuntu VM I use at times, and I decided to take a few minutes to try out PoSh on Ubuntu 16.04. Installation was easy, as are most things on Linux. Not quite as simple as Chocolatey, but close. This is certainly one of the ways that Linux is a bit easier to use than Windows. Or maybe we're just more used to the command line in Linux. In any case, it's a very simple process, which I documented in a blog. For those of you that use PoSh, this will be easy, and for those of you used to Linux and shell scripting, you'll feel right at home.

 I wondered how much stuff would work, but my first few tests, grabbing some generic, non SQL Server, scripts worked fine. The .Net CORE project has already moved some of the namespaces and functionality over, and this means  that a lot of the management of your infrastructure systems is there. I don't see the SQL Server libraries ported over (if I'm wrong, someone let me know), but there certainly are some other items, including Azure modules. I thought the demos in this Channel 9 webinar, while simple, were pretty impressive.

Do most of us care about this? No, not really. If you're a person that runs Windows on laptops and desktops, this doesn't really matter to you. I run Linux for fun, but not for daily work and my use of these tools will likely be limited to testing. However, if I were to move to an Android or Linux machine in the future, it's nice to know that I could run the same packages across various platforms without changing any code. That's useful for collaboration with people that might want to work together on different platforms.

This is where this makes the world easier. If you have friends running Macs, or using Linux, then you can share code. Or they can write PoSh scripts and share them with you. While I love virtualization, sometimes it's a pain, and this is why I keep an installation of SQL Server on my host. It's simpler and easier to work with in some situations. This is also why I look forward to a SQL Server developer edition on Linux (and hopefully OSX). It's just a smoother world when the OS becomes a matter of choice, rather than a requirement to run some code.