I’m working little-by-little towards using PowerShell as my primary command shell instead of cmd.exe.  I’m still a ways away, but PowerShell Community Extensions takes me a bit closer to my goal.  Here’s a description from their web site:

PowerShell Community Extensions (PSCX) is aimed at providing a widely useful set of additional cmdlets, providers, aliases, filters, functions and scripts for Windows PowerShell that members of the community have expressed interest in.

PSCX contains quite a collection of useful extensions, but the one extension that pushed me over the edge to install it was a cd history - a feature available on the mini-computer systems I used in the 80’s (VMS from DEC).  If you perform all your calls to Set-Location through PSCX’s cd function, you can go backward and forward between all the locations you visited.

There is a lot to learn in PSCX, so I’ll try to write about the various features over time.