What do you use to develop for PowerShell?

Question

I don't see a Visual Studio plugin for it (although I didn't look that hard, so I might have missed it), and searches turn up random third-party solutions, but is there something that comes with PowerShell or something that plugs into Visual Studio?

Answer 1

PowerShell v2 CTP has a nice GUI interface which includes the ability to run multiple runspaces, and edit and run scripts. The script editor has syntax highlighting which is very helpful. PSH v2 also has other useful features such as script cmdlets. It's very cool. PowerGUI is supposed to be pretty neat too although I haven't personally used it. Before PSH v2 thhough, I used to use Textpad with a syntax file that was created for the pre-release version of PowerShell - Monad.

Answer 2

Have you seen powershell.com which has a couple of excited reviews.

Answer 3

Visual Studio templates are available here. And there are samples in the Server 2008 SDK for developing providers and hosts.

If you are talking about an IDE for scripting, see this question (How to Get Started with PowerShell)

Answer 4

The beauty of PS is the command line. To be honest with you, I do the vast majority of my development at the command line. With the PowerTab snapin from /\/\O\/\/, I have as good intellisense as I have found in any IDE for PS. Once I have all the parts worked out at the command line then I use VIM to put it all into a script.

Answer 5

PrimalScript by Sapien is good. It's pay though.

Answer 6

Depends on what you mean by "develop."

PowerShell can be used quite effectively from the command line without scripting. However, if you do get into scripting, products include PowerShell Plus, PrimalScript, and PowerGUI.

If you're developing cmdlets and snap-ins, Visual Studio doesn't require any plug-ins, although you do need the reference assemblies available in the Windows SDK.

Visual Studio has no plans to host PowerShell as a script editor - the Visual Studio team feels that most admins wouldn't have Visual Studio, and that their goal is to make better development tools, not scripting tools (which is pretty distinct in terms of features that you need to be more efficient). So don't look for PowerShell scripting to show up in Visual Studio, at least not in the immediate future. There are some third-party stuff to get it in there, but nothing as good as the dedicated script editors I listed above.

Answer 7

I mostly use PowerGui Script Editor. It allows me to use multi-file editing and debugging as well as straight command-line stuff.