Friday, April 17, 2009

PowerShell Terminology: Common Engineering Criteria

I recently started a series on PowerShell terminology HERE.  One thing I mentioned was Microsoft’s Common Engineering Criteria (CEC).

You can read through Microsoft’s official web site HERE.

From my understanding, CEC is a set of best practices that are to be implemented in all server-based products.  Now, this may be some kind of internal document, and I’ve never seen it, so this is my unofficial interpretation of things…

Microsoft added PowerShell as of their CEC 2009 standards.  Apparently, if a server product doesn’t meet all of the CEC guidelines, the particular product team must justify each and every deviance from this to some internal Microsoft group who likely oversees the compliance to the standards.

Based on the products that have recently come out from Microsoft, I don’t believe the standard outlines exactly how PowerShell should be implemented in products.  This is my conclusion based on seeing the differences with how newer products have varying levels of PowerShell support.

I introduced some new terms HERE: “PowerShell-enablers”, “loosely integrated products”, and “tightly integrated products”.  I’ll likely cover these last 2 terms next week.