During the last months I’ve become a big fan of Powershell. It is a great shell which allows you to do things in a very flexible manner. When it comes to BizTalk administration tasks however most of the time you end up writing scripts that use WMI to do things.
I would be great if BizTalk developers or administrators:
- just could walk through the biztalk artifacts in the same way we do with file folders.
- have a (rich) set of powershell cmdlets aimed at BizTalk.
In other words we need a: Powershell provider for BizTalk. Searching the internet resulted in nothing. I found one initiative but that did not seem to have started and there were also no downloadable bits.
Anyway I decided to code a BizTalk provider myself. I have copied the artifact hierarchy tree used in the BizTalk Administration Console as much as possible (see screenshots below). The provider also supports tab completion which makes it very easy to navigate through the BizTalk artifacts.
The screenshot below contains an example of a BizTalk cmdlet to stop a specific host.
Although I’ve been very, very busy with this in the last couple of weeks there is still a lot of work to be done. So why am I telling you about this when there are no downloadable bits yet. There are two reasons:
- I hope there are BizTalkers out there that use Powershell and want to test my provider eventually. (If so drop a comment or e-mail).
- I want to make a list of first release cmdlets that should be included. (Suggestions? Let me know!)
Posted by Randal van Splunteren 
) I asked the real expert (Yossi) to validate my results.
) Yossi posted about the 
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