Launching PowerShell 2.0 into .net4 via F# Interactive or IronPython 2.7

With .net4 being 18 months old, and the Win8/PowerShell 3.0 being both in CTP and only for Win7+, it's a drag having to do things with .net 4 code when you really could do them faster and better in PowerShell. So, why not bootstrap ourselves from out of the box PowerShell 2.0 into the .net 4 world with a little help from another scripting language which is .net 4 aware? This saves messing about with environment activation variables, centralized registry settings or application config files, and takes advantage of the fact that PowerShell, like other scripting languages, can be hosted by another .net process.

The recipe is based around Bart de Smet's Option 2 – Hosting Windows PowerShell yourself.

Via F# interactive:

Via IronPython 2.7 (augmented to take command line arguments via the -Options parameter):

Since we can't pipe into Start-Process, the inner script is written to a temporary file; and then the initial PowerShell process waits so that it can safely delete it. If you would rather, it's reasonable to save the script to a constant .fsx or .py, replace $source with the path to that file, then the -Wait and Remove-Item -Force $source can be removed.

Replacing the fixed command line arguments for the F# interactive launched PowerShell with ones input to the script as per IronPython follows the same pattern. In either case, care has to be taken with getting your quotation marks right, and the IPy example is rather rough-and-ready. Besides, doing appropriate quotation parsing and escaping would obscure the real point of the exercise.

Note: Launching PowerShell directly from the .net4 command line launches PowerShell in the plain old .net 2 configuration; it is, alas, not sticky.

Note: These scripts are intended to give you a .net4 based interactive session; an alternative approach aimed at running individual commands can be found on Jason Stangroome's GitHub.