James O'Neill has an awesome post on why you should learn PowerShell now or get left behind. I have been advocating at work for a while now and his is a great post on the importance of getting on the band wagon now.

When v2 was released last week I tossed this email notification and quick links together for my co-workers.

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PowerShell v2 is the native scripting and management shell for Windows 7 and Windows 2008r2. Last week, Microsoft released versions for Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003sp2 and Server 2008sp2. They have released it under the title of Windows Management Framework which is made up of;
• Windows Remote Management (WinRM) 2.0
• Windows PowerShell 2.0
• Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) 4.0

Microsoft added PowerShell as part of their Common Engineering Criteria for all server based products as of 2009 so it’s something to be aware of going forward for all their products.

The announcement on the PowerShell team blog is here;
http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2009/10/27/windows-management-f...

The software, and links to documentation, can be found here;
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968929

Some articles on the differences can be found on the Hey Scripting Guys website;
http://blogs.technet.com/heyscriptingguy/archive/2009/10/26/hey-scriptin...
http://blogs.technet.com/heyscriptingguy/archive/2009/10/27/hey-scriptin...
http://blogs.technet.com/heyscriptingguy/archive/2009/10/28/hey-scriptin...

A very good, and free, ebook can be found online and as a pdf here;
http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/

While PowerShell v2 comes with a nice editor, there are a lot of things I still use Notepad++ for and there is a great syntax highlighting lexer that can be found here;
http://poshcode.org/notepad++lexer/

Have fun playing with this great tool.