When to develop using Powershell vs C#?

c# powershell administration system-administration
halfbit picture halfbit · Nov 15, 2010 · Viewed 7.3k times · Source

I'm just getting started in PowerShell and one of my sysadmins told me that Powershell can do as much as C# can for systems management, if not more.

Please forgive the ignorance of this question, but when would I use Powershell over C#?

Answer

Roman Kuzmin picture Roman Kuzmin · Nov 15, 2010

1) PowerShell is good for relatively small well defined tasks, especially ephemeral one-day tasks and interactive tasks when you are coding right in the command line. If a task requires just a few lines of PowerShell code (and you know that because you know PowerShell well enough!) then launching a full C# project is often overkill.

2) C# is much better for large projects or where performance is critical. It is better for any project that will presumably require debugging and troubleshooting.

3) PowerShell and C# can perfectly work together. It is easy to call one from another. PowerShell is good for connecting .NET components. You can implement your complex and performance critical pieces in C# and then combine and glue those pieces together with PowerShell.

Related questions

.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system

I run this code to execute PowerShell code from an ASP.NET application: System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.Runspace runspace = System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.RunspaceFactory.CreateRunspace(); runspace.Open(); System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.Pipeline pipeline = runspace.CreatePipeline(); pipeline.Commands.AddScript(@"\\servername\path"); …

Read More
Execute PowerShell Script from C# with Commandline Arguments

I need to execute a PowerShell script from within C#. The script needs commandline arguments. This is what I have done so far: RunspaceConfiguration runspaceConfiguration = RunspaceConfiguration.Create(); Runspace runspace = RunspaceFactory.CreateRunspace(runspaceConfiguration); runspace.Open(); RunspaceInvoke scriptInvoker = new RunspaceInvoke(runspace); Pipeline …

Read More
ps1 cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system

I try to run powershell script from c#. First i set the ExecutionPolicy to Unrestricted and the script is running now from PowerShell ISE. Now this is c# my code: class Program { private static PowerShell ps; static void Main(string[] …

Read More