PowerShell Team Blog

When are we going to see a Visual Studio IDE supporting PowerShell?

A lightweight Visual Studo integrated development environment would be best given that we use a mix of T-SQL, C#, PowerShell and ASP.NET.  We mix all of those components into an application (e.g., ASP.NET web front end, C# and PowerShell applications for server side processing and T-SQL for database operations).  We used to do more monolithic ASP applications but since have made our web GUI pages much much simpler due the overhead of maintaining about 100 complex web pages.  It would greatly help us to have even a simple Visual Studio IDE for PowerShell.

Since I spend all day editing c# in visual studio using another editor to edit powershell scripts is a none starter. I just wish Powersell had better intergration esp with the debugger, help etc.

Droping out to the crude editing tools of a shell is baaaad (I used to use bash inside emacs). I want to be able to use a powerful scriptabe editor to hack powershell not f---- notepad!

I don't mind have a PowerShell console open in another window so much, but I do resent having a third window open for another editor. Of course, the only reason why I use a third editor is because that editor (TextPad) has rudimentary syntax highlighting for PowerShell scripts. VS has turned me into a wimp: if it ain't syntax highlighted, I don't want to use it.

I am a hobbyist and can't afford to purchase the Visual Studio Suite or Primal Script software.  I do not sell my software.

Can't something along the lines of the 'Visual Basic Editor' packaged inside EXCEL be made to work with PowerShell?

I would also like to start using PS as a replacement for all those office vb scripts.  I think this would be a logical starting place.

Fred J.

This message is for Bruce Payette.  Bruce, I love your book, however, I do take an unhandled exception to your post about VS. I have been using the Visual Basic 6 editor for years to build VBScript projects because Visual Studio.NET and later insisted on removing the Set statement.  Anyway, the reason I used VB6 was mainly because of the automatic formatting and the Object Browser.  Because I am OCD, I like pretty code and VB6 does a decent job of making pretty code for me.

Now that PowerShell is out, I was extremely disappointed that VS 2008 did not have an add-in or support for PowerShell.  Imagine if it did. I could actually use Intellisense and even create simple WinForms apps in PowerShell with ease!  My code would look pretty too.  Did I mention OCD?

As an IT Admin for life I have coded in everything including 370 Assembly, JCL, CICS/COBOL, CLIST, DCL, FORTRAN, UNIX Shell Scripts, C++, C#, VBScript, and now PowerShell using some of the most primitive text editors available (like SPF and vi).  Now we admins finally get a superb scripting language that just about does it all (except the ability to create class libraries), yet we still can't use Visual Studio.

When will we ever be treated seriously?  I guess because we don't write device drivers, we truly are second class developers.

Oh well.  Maybe we can get a real editor with the next scripting language SuperShell.