One of the many benifits as an Infragistics MVP is that you get quite early involved in product development in order to give feedback.

This could either be feedback on a new feature, an API change, or a brand new product!

Last spring it was time to give feedback again. There was an email on the Infragistics NDA mailing list which announced that work on a new product - Infragistics NetAdvantage for Powershell - had been started. Being an absolute Powershell fan, I felt really excited to offer my help with alpha and beta testing, giving feedback, etc.

After some great discussions between the director of product management Joseph Berres, lead developer Ambrose J. Tall and some Infragistis MVPs, the team managed to finish a first proof of concept prototype in early September. Some weeks later I met Dr. Tony Komischke, Director of User Experience at Infragistics, at the Basta conference in Germany. There he gave me a first demo of the product. At this point he was able to show me an early Version of the powershell grid: Infragistics NetAdvantage for Powershell powerGrid. I would have loved to see the charting component powerChart, too. Unfortunately it hadn’t been ready for presentation at that time.

To my question how the idea for a whole powershell suite had been born, Tony Komischke gave me a quite interesting answer:

It was actually one of our internal IT guys who had the idea. During a meeting he complained that lately more and more server products came to market without an usable admin UI. Instead he had to struggle with some colourless command line tools. This situation started the whole thing. We all thought that Windows administrators love decent UIs and don’t want to work with a boring command line. If they liked the command line, they would have become Linux administrators! And that’s the point of Infragistics NetAdvantage for Powershell. With this product, we give administrators back what they deserve!

Since Basta conference some time went by. The product has nearly arrived at its final state. Starting with tomorrow, registered users will be able to download at CTP Version of it in the download area of Infrastics’ homepage.

The first webinars on NetAdvantage for Powershell will be made available approximately next week by Infragistics new media evangelist Jeff Shoemaker.

During the quaterly Infragistics MVP call, Mr Beres stated:

“We really wanted to show off our high end visualizations in a DOS window” said Beres. “PowerShell gave us a great opportunity to mix data analytics with the new features in the Command Window, like colorization” he continued.

As an Infragistics MVP I already enjoyed testing the product. Below you’re going to find some impressions:

The powershell standard output

Output as PowerGrid. Notice the usage of the sortable table pattern as well as table and column borders.

The corner treatements pattern which includes curves in all rectangle corners didn’t make it into the CTP as there were some performance issues with GDI+ and the gpu’s hardware acceleration.

Output as PowerChart. I’ve chosen a bar chart as output type