Data Warehouse Management Command Line Application - PowerShell or C# Console App

If you write your management functionality as PowerShell cmdlets, then you can surface that functionality either by letting people run cmdlets directly, or by wrapping them in a GUI. Going with PowerShell probably gives you the most long-term flexibility, and as MS implements more PowerShell cmdlets, it means that managing your data warehouse could be incorporated with other, larger business processes if necessary. I would probably NOT choose to write a C# console app - but I have a distinctly more "administrator" perspective. We admins are tired of having custom console apps tossed at us - the idea of PowerShell is to standardize everything in a way that supports both command-line and GUI administration.

I think you can be successful with both, and should be able to switch between the two without too much hassle. If you start out building a console app but learn PowerShell later, you can throw away a lot of the console app-specific code (command-line parsing code for example) and build a few PowerShell cmdlets to wrap your existing API. Or, if you build a bunch of Cmdlets out the gate, but need to switch to a console app later, you won't have wasted much time writing the Cmdlets.

So, I don't really have strong advice one way or another. I will say: hey, go try PowerShell. If you don't like it, it's not too difficult to switch.

I have found that PowerShell is a much more maintainable solution for smaller things. Console apps require relinking into new libraries and recompiling and redistributing out when the libraries you depend on change (in my case going from Visual Studio 2005 - Visual Studio 2008's codecoverage and other things) as well as executables your scripts may call vsinstr, mstest, etc. where as with PowerShell scripts you can easily customize for each environment you have and don't have to go through the compile, link, deploy stuff for every environment you choose. In fact if you get your path info from the registry the same script can run in both environments.

You can do everything you want with either, I just prefer having to maintain a single simple text file, then a console app. Just personal preference.