Jeffrey Snover is a Microsoft Technical Fellow, PowerShell Chief Architect, and the Chief Architect for the Azure Infrastructure and Management group which includes Azure Stack,[1] System Center and Operations Management Suite.[2] Snover is the inventor of Windows PowerShell, an object-based distributed automation engine, scripting language, and command line shell and was the chief architect for Windows Server.[3]
After studying physics at the University of New Hampshire (1978–1982), Snover worked as architect and development manager for Tivoli NetView at Tivoli Software (IBM), and as a consulting software engineer in the DEC management group at Apollo Computer, where he led various network and systems management projects. He also worked at Storage Technology Corporation, and various start-up companies.[4] Snover joined Microsoft in 1999 as divisional architect for the Management and Services Division, providing technical direction for Microsoft's management technologies and products.[4]
Snover is known primarily as the "father" and chief architect of Microsoft's object-oriented command line interpreter Windows PowerShell, whose development began under the codename "Monad" (msh) at the beginning of 2003. He had the idea of an object-pipeline and implemented the first prototype in the C# programming language. After the completion of version 1.0 in November 2006, Windows PowerShell was downloaded nearly one million times within half a year. In 2015, Microsoft promoted Snover to Technical Fellow.[5]
Snover was also the Chief Architect of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
Snover held eight patents prior to joining Microsoft, and has registered over 30 patents since.[6][7] He is a frequent speaker at industry and research conferences on a variety of management and language topics.[4]