BITS and pieces...

Over the last couple of days I've been playing with the new cmdlets that ship with PowerShell v2 CTP3 that let you hook into BITS. If you need to move large volumes of data around, don't want to melt your network gear, and want to be able to cater for users who may reboot on a whim and then want your file transfer that was 98% complete pick up where it left off then BITS is for you. Sysadmins have previously been able to do this using bitsadmin from the command-line, but now you can hook into BITS through PowerShell. So far all I've done is knock up a pretty simple script to transfer a 1GB file from a fileshare, display an updated '% complete' value every few seconds, then tidy up after the successful transfer. It's still amusing to pull the network while the script is running and watch it just sit there patiently, not throwing a strop and falling into a heap, and then carrying on when connectivity is restored.

Here's the original article on the Windows PowerShell blog, which explains it pretty well, and PowerShell v2 CTP3 can be downloaded here.