Yes, you’ve read the title correctly… Windows RT has PowerShell!
And here I was afraid that RT would be a totally stripped Windows version, so no PowerShell…
But there seems to be someone at Microsoft that loves us scripters… so thank you!
Edit: One tiny little detail… I just heard on Twitter that the PowerShell on RT is constrained.
Haven’t found any documentation on it though, guess that will be available later?
Can you please test if Windows Forms is usable from PowerShell?
Also if .hta applications work…
Hi Georgi, I only had my hands on a device for a few minutes so wasn’t able to test any of such things… I’m gonna wait for a Surface Pro 🙂
I think Windows Forms would not work on Windows RT, I believe only the PowerShell Cmdlets are available. .NET classes are not available in the constrained Windows RT environment.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. Hoping that remoting still works… if so I’m still happy 🙂
One example is this. Say you want to parse some XML in Powershell on Windows RT. You can, but you end up naturally using .NET methods without realizing it. You can load XML into a $variable, and drill down into it ($variable.nodeone.subnode). But you can’t .CloneNode, .AppendNode, etc. Heck you can’t even .ToString. You’ll get the following error, “Cannot invoke method. Method invocation is supported only on core types in this language mode.”
Hi Joe,
Thanks for sharing… that seriously s*cks… 🙁
Jeff.
nope… the same thing…[reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName( “System.Windows.Forms”) results in Cannot invoke method. Method invocation is supported only on core types in this language mode… although, the libraries are there, how else would all “integrated desktop apps” like calc, notepad, etc. work… I just think it is a block hardcoded somewhere in there…
I’ve been hoping that even without being able to compile our own desktop-mode apps, we’d at least be able to script them. Quite a lot of things can be made in PowerShell on x86, my latest pet project is a web server for example.
Thank you for checking that. I suspected this might be the case, but didn’t have a definitive proof. Your post really helps.
Well, that settles it for me then, I will not be buying into MS ARM tablets until they come to their senses and unlock things for the devs.
“integrated desktop apps” like calc, notepad etc. aren’t written using System.Windows.Forms, they are straight Win32.
I don’t think System.Windows.Forms is included as part of WIndows RT, only the basic parts of the .Net framework and the WinRT libraries are present.
Hi Edward,
Thanks for the information. Luckily quite a bit of information came available after I wrote the post 🙂
Jeff.