I don’t know about you, but I like the actions I perform on a computer to be fluent… so whenever I start a PowerShell prompt I have to wait a few seconds before it’s loaded.
Now this is not a problem, just a little annoying and something I’ve always experienced but never taken the time to investigate if this could be made faster.

So, I’ve just stumbled upon an older blog post of Jeffrey Snover named “Speeding Up PowerShell Startup – Updating Update-Gac.ps1”.

Ask you can see, this post is back from September 2008 so I was wondering if this would still be accurate on a Windows 8 device with PowerShell v3… and it is!

After applying the script, starting the PowerShell prompt was blazing fast!

Set-Alias ngen (Join-Path ([System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeEnvironment]::GetRuntimeDirectory()) ngen.exe)
[AppDomain]::CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies() |
sort {Split-path $_.location -leaf} |
%{
$Name = (Split-Path $_.location -leaf)
if ([System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeEnvironment]::FromGlobalAccessCache($_))
{
Write-Host "Already GACed: $Name"
}else
{
Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "NGENing : $Name"
ngen $_.location | %{"`t$_"}
}
}