We were just today discussing it, so I went on a little search but found nothing, zip, nada.
What is the future of ms's cmd shell? Do they intend to replace it completely with powershell in the future versions of windows, or just ship powershell as a parallel alternative ?
Does anyone have any links, articles, ... whatever regarding the above mentioned, cause I haven't been able to mind ms's stand regarding.
The latest build of Windows 7 has the two shells separately. I believe they won't replace the good-ol' cmd.exe. They need it mainly for compatibility reasons. A lot of programs call cmd /c, and replicating the exact same mechanism for powershell would be a duplication of effort. So, I suppose the cmd.exe remains.
cmd.exe is not going anywhere (it's far too widely used).
However, I don't think you'll be seeing any enhancements to it (not that they've been burning through them anyway).
Powershell is extremely good at doing complex tasks. However it is harder to learn and it runs much, much slower.
CMD will remain because you can run batch files and command line ops EXTREMELY quickly. Additionally it is extremely inexpensive to pop up a command shell and execute a command.
Imagine how many login scripts would break if they removed cmd.exe? Even if Powershell could run all cmd commands seamlessly (which it can't), login scripts running under Powershell would be far too slow during user login, as you would need to wait while .NET loaded up as well.
I once heard of a Citrix Admin who converted his login scripts to Powershell and then quickly realised that this was a bad idea.