Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Do you want a PowerShell based build environment?

Windows PowerShell — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 04:50:34 GMT

If so SPEAK UP NOW .  The Windows SDK team is looking for feedback on whether this would be useful. 

Do you want a PowerShell based build environment?

Noticias externas — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 05:11:03 GMT

If so SPEAK UP NOW .  The Windows SDK team is looking for feedback on whether this would be useful

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Tomas Restrepo — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:01:34 GMT

YES, YES, YES

Well, actually, I already do this; I sort of ported the SDK batch files into my powershell script profile (it even looks for 3.5/2008 first and if not found falls back to 2.0/2005).

Seriously, for me, not having the SDK/VS build environment available in powershell was a big deterrent to using it as my day to day shell. It was only until I spent time setting it up that I could make powershell my default shell (and I ain't going back to cmd.exe)

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Henri Wiechers — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:00:46 GMT

Absolutely. A build environment with the power of PowerShell would be awesome.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Alexander Gornik — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:25:45 GMT

PowerSHell should be the only build script out there.

It should definitely replace MSBuild / XML files.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

vermorel — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:07:09 GMT

Not sure whether my comment is relevant. But the thing that I would like to see would be more "interoperability" between MsBuild and PowerShell.

- To be able (natively) to run MsBuild tasks from the PowerShell.

- To be able (natively) to run PowerShell within MsBuild.

For now, it ain't easy to do so; but if the integration (both ways) was nicely setup, I would most certainly put more PSH scripts into my builds.

Best regards,

Joannès

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Richard Siddaway — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:44:19 GMT

Yes please.

I am moving more and more tasks to PowerShell. Having a PowerShell build environment would be very useful.

I'd be happy to be involved in testing

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Devang Mehta — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:04:27 GMT

I would say that such an environment would be god-send. We've tried msbuild for our environment and it is hard (and in some cases impossible) to do what we need it to do.

We are building a hybrid web app with old perl code and new C# code in it. Our current build requires modification of code using regex's at deploy time. We are currently stuck with a perl build utility for that reason (and BTW, we love perl :-).

We would love a utility that handles C# compilation and a full featured scripting language to do special things. It would be killer utility and powershell seems ideal for it.

I don't think our situation is that unique, there must be so many applications facing a similar situation.

Today, our options in migrating to C# are limited by legacy as well as convenience issues. And a hybrid architecture is very appealing if you do lots of quick development and future consolidation like we do.

It would make sense for MSFT to remove those bottlenecks for us by giving us powershell build environment.

Please do this!

--Devang

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Lionel — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:16:12 GMT

What is a "PowerShell based build environment"? Is it: 1) an alternative to msbuild? 2) using powershell from inside msbuild? 3) an msbuild-like cmdlet?

Anyway, it would be quite welcome.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Skyrambler — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:20:44 GMT

Some of the more interesting applications of Powershell, so far, have been in scaling administration. Making things possible that you would not contemplate using existing technologies. i.e. rebuilding and reconfiguring automatically 1000 x 2008 servers overnight for training purposes.

I can see interesting possibilities if the build environment had easy-to-use powershell support.

Kindest Regards

Mike Walker, Member of the PSUK group

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

fangelico — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:49:32 GMT

- To be able (natively) to run MsBuild tasks from the PowerShell.

- To be able (natively) to run PowerShell within MsBuild.

i agree on a 100%

I think that more powershell on everything is a good thing :D

Cheers

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Bob Gregory — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:00:13 GMT

I don't think that MSBuild interoperability is what's being discussed here. I think (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that we're talking about an actual PS build environment?

Like Rake, only with PS. If so, yes, count me in.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Matt Johnson — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:03:25 GMT

This sounds like a great idea. I already use powershell for everything else, why not add it to helping me with my builds.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Eric — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:47:55 GMT

An extensible DSL is much better than XML config files.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

David Mohundro — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:12:24 GMT

Yes! More PowerShell!

On top of this, I'd also like to see build tasks that are scriptable by PowerShell (i.e. sort of like Rake with Ruby, or Bake with Boo). This may be what you're referring to and if so, I apologize for the duplication.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Robbie Foust — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:33:33 GMT

Yes!!! Powershell based build environment, please!

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Nick — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:41:40 GMT

I agree with Joannes, that would be the most useful. I still think most people are going to want to do builds using MSBuild. But there are times when more power is needed, and a simple batch script is just plain out dated.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

ChrisW — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:02:43 GMT

I think this would be a fantastic addition!!

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Jason — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:16:20 GMT

I personally would really like powershell integration in the build environment. I've been using CC.Net and NAnt for a couple of years and have recently been migrating it to msbuild and in doing so have found myself already converting a lot of the custom tasks to powershell rather than having dedicated task dlls that are harder to maintain. So it would be very useful for me to have that already built in and supported by the build framework itself. Glad to see you guys are already thinking ahead about it!

-Jason

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Don Jones — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:20:45 GMT

Indeed I'd like to see this. This is absolutely a task that needs to be automated in many circumstances, and PowerShell is ideal for task-specific automation. Plus, PowerShell acts as a very task-focused API that developers can build on top of.

I have customers who frequently spend a great deal of time creating build scripts; a PowerShell-based environment would be more efficient to script as it'd be more task-centric, and it'd also enable them to leverage their growing skill set. Essentially, anything Microsoft produces that is scriptable or which needs automation should be done in PowerShell. Wow... a standard... think of it...

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Nick — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:15:42 GMT

Yes, please look at some kind of harmonization between MSBuild and Powershell.

Having some of the SDK command line tools implemented as Cmdlets would be useful too.

Thanks for asking,

Nick.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

KeithH — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:29:11 GMT

I agree with the comment about using PowerShell more directly from MSBuild. That might be enough to push us to use TeamBuild. I currently prefer PowerShell's flexibility to MSBuild/TeamBuild so all our build scripts are written in PowerShell and we invoke msbuild from there. I would also love to see native PowerShell cmdlet support for TFS (especially version control). Still whatever extra PowerShell goodies I can get out of VS and/or the Windows SDK, I'll take them.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

PaulG — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:13:13 GMT

I also agree that good interoperability with MSBuild would be great. We are heavily invested in MSBuild scripts and build tasks.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Dave Kingston — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:51:09 GMT

I'm unsure what you're envisioning. But I would like to put my two cents worth in. I would like to be able to natively run MSBuild from Powershell. This would be tremedously useful for error tracking in the build process and for numerous other custom requirements that some builds have.

I'm actually amazed that it's as hard as it is right now.

I've seen tutorials for using powershell in MSBuild, but it should be native as well.

Anyway, yes. Integration good.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Steven Murawski — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:05:24 GMT

I'm not really a developer, but I write a bit of code in Visual Studio and I would love to see more integration with PowerShell. My job as an admin in a Windows environment has me working with PowerShell on a daily basis and I would love the ability to transition what I know with PowerShell into working with Visual Studio.

Thanks!

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

tfl — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:28:08 GMT

Yes please. Please create a PowerShell based build enviornment!

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:18:16 GMT

Yes a PowerShell based build enviroment would be great.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Robin van Dijk — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:35:40 GMT

Yes please!!!

From the moment I first worked with Powershell I was hoping that in the end it's going to completely replace command.com / the old dos shell interface / vbscripting / etc. I support every action that's going to get us a step closer towards that goal.

P.S. Although we can get msbuild and Powershell integration with some simple code (see the powershell team blog) I also like some official support for that, but perhaps this is the wrong site / blog to ask for that...

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

JK — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:16:29 GMT

YES, PowerShell build env would be good.

But even better would be MSBuild & PowerShell integration:

- using PowerShell scripts (inline and/or in-process) from MSBuild

- running MSBuild (in-process) from PowerShell

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Ed — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:15:39 GMT

I'd be one of the first to sign up to use this feature if it were made available.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

TWNZ — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:55:28 GMT

Anything PowerShell would appear to be 'a good thing' !

Regards

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Mac — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 04:26:16 GMT

As long as you're at it, might as well offer some MSDeploy functionality as well in Power Shell.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Cash Foley — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:00:30 GMT

Building .Net Applications? Maybe I'm missing the point, but MSBuild is great for "building" and it's part of the framework.

What is the "gap" to be served by doing it in PowerShell? Having MSBuild CmdLet(s) would be really nice.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Staffan Gustafsson — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:26:18 GMT

I second Joannès.

Integration between MSBuild and powershell is the key.

MSBuild will be a part of many builds. So will hopefully powershell.

/Staffan

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Dr Herbie — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:44:51 GMT

Yes please!

We don't really use MSBuild at the moment and tend towards Powershell (so we can use cmdlets update build numbers in our custom release tracking database) and getting VS to do the build (so it automatically does our MSI builds too).

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Arnaud — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:59:30 GMT

Yes I think it is a very good idea !!!

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Sam Gentile — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:33:55 GMT

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re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

John Vottero — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:07:24 GMT

PowerShell based build environment? YES, PLEASE!!!

A PowerShell script that creates appropriate aliases and variables would be a good start. Long term, I think all command line tools should be PowerShell cmdlets.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Serfmum Yossarian — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:56:42 GMT

Yes, definitely. Something along the lines of rake would be fantastic. PowerShake, anyone?

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Richard — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:26:05 GMT

I think PowerShell anything would be a good thing too. Also besides the flexibility, PowerShell is still a command line shell so I see only positives so far...

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Erich Stehr — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 04:44:35 GMT

Please! The only cmd.exe windows I normally have on my screen now are for the build environment; everywhere else I can is now PowerShell.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Adam — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:12:22 GMT

Somewhat related and apparently quite some people are looking for it - running PowerShell scripts from MSBuild. Bart De Smet has a post on the topic at http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/archive/2008/02/16/invoking-powershell-scripts-from-msbuild.aspx.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Nick Howell — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:15:49 GMT

Integration between MSBuild and PowerShell would be fantastic! Hoping this will definitely get in.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Captain Literal — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:57:18 GMT

I have a build task that hosts a PowerShell runspace and I use it everywhere - trouble is that every task that I use ends up hosting a new runspace and that just takes a little time.

What would be really useful is not just native integration between MS Build and PowerShell (as already suggested), but everything using PowerShell - from Visual Studio to all the little .exe that we end up running every day just to get something built and tested.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

David — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:26:38 GMT

A number of cmdlets to provide parts of an application layer for integration could be usefull. Currently using (N)Ant for TDD deployment and similar system management scenarious could be more easily tested i.e. also considering instrumentation of apps towards proper Windows system integration. This could include the cloud like Windows Live Service etc. and provide for competive services as well by providing a reference solution for such a cmdlet bridging developments tools like Ant, MSBuild etc. with infrastructure. In one scenario one should be able to test production quality by simply integrating a set of cmdlets. The cmdlets to take prarameters. I.e. running a basic integrated system management test some app. configuration of subsystems and services on the WIndows Server System like:

- Application platform (i.e. BizTalk, IIS, Sharepoint),

- Data (fs, db etc.),

- Deployment (msi, registration),

- Desktop (wdm i.e desktop band,, fonts),

- Hardware virtualization,

- Informaton (i.e. Windows Search),

- Management (GP, Log, System Center, WMI, RDP), TS, App. Comp, Process, Performance, Hardware, AD),

- Media (Live, MCE, WMDC, Office, WM, XNA), Network)

This kind of use would be the natural choice for a Power Shell - and such tests could be automated and provided by MS. I.e. a basic example: a professional development project for Windows Server should log to the event log ... so during development, if app throws execeptions or similar without some special logging (beyond Windows native) to the event log the it could fail the test. Powershell can be used to and does already have a number of reference solutions for Windows host enviroment. So I think Powershell should be taken more in its own direction and development perspective giving good support for the managing the host enviroment. There are better tools like MSBuild and (N)Ant to support developers with the build task itself. This more extends to Test Driven Development where I see Powershell to help verify proper behaviour or even suggest to implement a feature based on lack of behaviour in a test-deployment scenario on a local or non-local Windows platform.

Regards,

David

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Ravi — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:08:10 GMT

Yes Powershell based build environment is a welcome idea. I would like to see Powershell everywhere!!! :-)

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Georg Begerow — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:57:33 GMT

Yes, please! We currently use a combination of PowerShell which drives NAnt which drives MSBuild. The Nant support is historical, but we never found a reason to rewrite everything in MSBuild as NAnt is more flexible. So far we used Subversion as Repository and NUnit as Unittestframework. Newer projects are going to use TFS only. Subversion and NUnit are supported by Nant so we can drive our nightly build with this. TFS ist missing the nessecary support in NAnt, MSBuild and as of today, Powershell. Some of the features are currently made available via c# wrapper around TFS Webservices but the result is currently .... suboptimal.

To use Powershell as build environment we strongly need to fully control TFS, including CheckOut/CheckIn, automated Unittests, building Workitem via Powershell, complete workitems etc.

Also must powershell reflect the settings in solutions and projects. Last week I spend two hours searching an error which was caused by not synchronizing a conditional Symbol into the build script.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

TimK — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 04:13:18 GMT

Powershell based build environment, would this be something like winpe + powershell? If so I could really use something like that. Were I work we still use Win XP and I currently use winpe + vbscript + wmi but then change to Powershell once the OS has been deployed. It would be nice to leverage my knowledge into one shell (Love Powershell and the use of .net objects) but I have to be creative with batch files and script when I perform tasks with winpe.

Thanks again.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Stefan Didak — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:24:53 GMT

Yes. YES! Absolutely. I've already been using PS to build up my build automation management. Anything that would help minimize my efforts would be VERY welcome!

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Tim — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:59:51 GMT

I would love to see a PowerShell based build environment. At the moment, I use cmake to get myself a Visual Studio project, which works OK, but I would much prefer to be able to interact with MS compilers via PowerShell.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

O.Z. — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:19:05 GMT

PowerShell build environment is the MUST. With all the features of GNU build system and no less.

Nanda Lella: Do you want a PowerShell based build environment?

Rob Relyea - Xamlified — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:05:45 GMT

Jeffrey Snover (PowerShell Architect) pointed to Nanda's post asking for feedback for the Windows

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

John Taylor — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 02:53:06 GMT

A Powershell based build environment would be extremely useful.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Karl Meissner — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:17:12 GMT

I have used many flavors of make, nant, ms-build.

I have many different build systems for many project over 15 years for several large organizations.

Powershell would make a very powerful build platform. It has all the logical and pattern matching functionality you could desire. The big thing it brings to the table for me is the fast and easy integration of .Net interfaces and assemblies into the script environment.

As other MS products get Powershell enabled, its utility as glue code becomes obvious.

It really opens up the world to the scripter to be able load and run assemblies on the fly.

The opportunities to unit test generated code on the fly are really exciting.

Please bring Powershell into the next release of Visual Studio.

It would be powerful :-)

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Mike Langley — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:20:35 GMT

I have to agree that MSBuild/TFSBuild should be accessable from PowerShell and visa versa. I use powershell everywhere I can and would even be much happier if the Windows Plateform were to actually adopt PS as its command line instead of the outdated command line of today.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Damian Reeves — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:13:09 GMT

This would be far beyond useful.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Denis Vuyka — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:21:15 GMT

I think this feature will be very useful. Especially native TFS support and launching of tests

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

John — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:19:44 GMT

I'd appreciate a PowerShell-based build environment. Here's an article on CodeProject about the PowerShell build environment that we created for our deployments at my work. Maybe you could reduce our script down to a dozen lines by providing things we had to create from scratch. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/install/ExtractAndBuild.aspx

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Richard — Tue, 20 May 2008 00:39:29 GMT

Yes, Powershell Build environment would be cool. Also, having builtin Powershell scripting for Pre-build and post-build in VS 2008.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

piers7 — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:28:28 GMT

Yes!

XML based syntaxes like NAnt and MSBuild are all very well for the IDE to spit out, but they're a major pain when it comes to writing your own custom stuff (unless you bit the bullet and compile them as Tasks). You loose variable scope and explicit parameters, have to learn a whole new syntax that bends over backwards to express 'codey' concepts in markup and kiss goodbye to any intellisense / debugging tool support.

A Powershell DSL for build that understood the VS solution / project file structure would be a major asset here. I'm envisaging that this would be something that would run hand-in-hand with MSBuild, probably in the role of orchestrating the overall 'uber' build process (ie the bits before and the bits after the solution build) in much the same way that the 'controlling' msbuild file for a Team Build does now. These are the bits where - in build processes I've put together - we take care of things like database snapshots and packaging the final build outputs into an xcopy ready form (which Team Build makes a real hash of).

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

Hans — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:20:57 GMT

Yes. PowerShell has much more powerful syntax and is more customizable than MSBuild.

re: Influence the future of Windows sdk : Powershell based build environment

eboyhan — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:33:52 GMT

i thought i saw a channel9 pres tween jeffery snover and bruce payette, where bruce demo'd something called poshmake which was described as "rake related" -- the demo did some neat things; the whole thing (the make stuff) was done in about 250 line of posh code -- seemed like the way to go to me