The imminent arrival of PowerShell 5.1 in the Windows 10 Anniversary update (assumption as the Windows 10 Insider previews have been showing PowerShell 5.1 for some time) and Windows Server 2016 (TP5 shows PowerShell 5.1) and the fact that PowerShell was officially released to the world 10 years ago come November started me thinking about what has been the biggest innovation in PowerShell over those 10 years.
Contenders that come to mind include:
– Remoting
– PowerShell modules
– CIM & CIM sessions
– Workflows
– Job engine
– Desired State Configuration
– PowerShell Gallery and package management
– PowerShell classes
– JSON support in PowerShell
– Internationalisation
– Error handling – try/catch
– Debugging enhancements
– REST API and Odata support
– PowerShell support for Microsoft products
– PowerShell support from third part vendors
– PowerShell community
Which do you think?
Or is it something else?
Leave a comment as I’m intrigued as to what people think has been the biggest PowerShell innovation
Richard Siddaway's Blog 
When it comes to innovating ideas, I think the number one thing that PowerShell has that most other command line scripting languages don’t (e.g. DOS, bash, etc.) is that it treats output as objects. That has removed the need for PowerShell writers to become highly skilled at manipulating strings and allowed us to focus on other areas of programming.
In my opinion, another innovating aspect of PowerShell is that is based on .NET and has easy access to .NET libraries. A lot of times I find myself wanting to do something, and after searching, find out that PowerShell does not yet have a native command to do it (a lot of times that command becomes available in a newer version of PowerShell). However, because I have full access to .NET, I can use one of it’s libraries to accomplish my task. I think this feature has helped allow us to create powerful scripts and continue to push PowerShell to the next level. As a result, I see PowerShell as more than just a command line shell, it’s a full programming language. We are writing PowerShell, committing it to code repositories (e.g. GitHub), running it through unit tests (e.g. Pester), using continuous integration platforms (e.g. Jenkins), and publishing it for end user consumption (e.g. MyGet). PowerShell development has become “a thing.”
Built in access to .NET
PSDrives.
PowerShell Community 😀
and PowerShell Gallery
PowerShell DSC
DSC for sure
I agree with Elijah, biggest Powershell innovation ever is the object oriented pipeline.. Everything else is built from that. DSC and Package/Module management are my second and third choice. 😉