I'm curious about your experience with Powershell now. Did you put much work into using it to automate your processes? I spent about half a day or so looking into Powershell at our all-C# shop, and decided to use Ruby for my automation instead, which I have much more experience with. If you moved away from it, what are you using instead?
The first task I tried to pick up was doing backups and restores of our SQL server databases. I spent a couple of hours and couldn't figure out how to get Powershell to do that, but it took about 10 minutes to find a T-SQL command to do what I wanted, figure out how to run it from the command line using sqlcmd, and set up a Ruby script to automate it and generate the commands dynamically, etc.
Powershell also seems to require installing dozens of little thingys for using most of its features, all of which are very picky about bittedness, and which are mostly tucked away in weird corners of Microsoft's sites. Ruby has one installer on an easy to find site, though I admit it took a while to discover that using anything but 32-bit 1.9.3 on Windows will only lead to pain.
We automated quite a bit with PowerShell. Our deployment scripts which unzip releases, update IIS config (apppools, virdirs, new sites) and our scheduled jobs are all done via PoSh. We also use it for lots of generation/execution of ad-hoc SQL for data manipulations.
As a shell (especially remoting to servers); it's great. As a scripting language, ironically I'm more likely to use F# (FSI) these days, mainly due to two serious bugs in PoSh Scheduled jobs we've never gotten any response from Microsoft over :(
The first task I tried to pick up was doing backups and restores of our SQL server databases. I spent a couple of hours and couldn't figure out how to get Powershell to do that, but it took about 10 minutes to find a T-SQL command to do what I wanted, figure out how to run it from the command line using sqlcmd, and set up a Ruby script to automate it and generate the commands dynamically, etc.
Powershell also seems to require installing dozens of little thingys for using most of its features, all of which are very picky about bittedness, and which are mostly tucked away in weird corners of Microsoft's sites. Ruby has one installer on an easy to find site, though I admit it took a while to discover that using anything but 32-bit 1.9.3 on Windows will only lead to pain.