Developer Team Blog

PowerShell Plus 1.0 Soft Launch

2008-03-06T07:42:00Z

Our 3rd generation PowerShell Host and Development Environment - PowerShell Plus has reached 1.0! We are doing away with the pretense of RC1, RTM etc when its not like we are releasing anything to a manufacturer to print a million CDs as we simply just release it to our web site.

The difference between our beta and 1.0 release is our commitment to our customers. We have disabled the auto-updating functionality because we only want to push out builds that have been widely tested to customers - however for those who like to live on the edge of innovation , we will continue to give access to our latest builds. In the future also we will update our auto-updating technology to allow you to choose to update to either trusted official releases, and latest builds.

Another difference in 1.0 is now we also have a MSI installer for those inclined. We are careful however not to ostracize those of you, like us, who value a portable application that doesn't have to have an installer and that can be run from a thumb drive if desired. Thus PowerShell Plus 1.0 has both a portable zip, and a MSI installer.

We are discontinuing selling the PowerShell Suite, but licenses for PowerShell Analyzer and the PowerShell Suite automatically work with PowerShell Plus, and PowerShell Analyzer will continue to be available to all customers as we continue to migrate important features over to PowerShell Plus 1.1

New Price

We have lowered the price to $79 - effectively giving you an Enterprise grade application for a hobbyist price. Check it out now at our Store

Additionally PS+ has a free 30 trial and beyond that it is free for non-commercial use!

Download

Zip file - Simply Unblock the ZIP (if downloaded with IE) , unzip and run.
MSI installer.

Videos

Check out our videos. There is our original trailer, plus a detailed video of our debugger, which is the most feature complete PowerShell debugger around - generations ahead of anything else.

Official Blog

We are moving away from PowerShellLive and centralizing everything including our forums and blogs around www.powershell.com . Our Official Blog is now at http://blog.powershell.com

Some Screen Shots

Here are a few screenshots to whet your appetite.

1) PowerShell Plus console with GUI code completion in MiniMode.

2) PowerShell Plus Full Console with Variables, Properties and Help Center visible while inserting a snippet directly into the console.

3) PowerShell Plus editor window showing our save pipeline object code completion.

4) Editor showing some debugging, the variable inspector and console preview, as well as code completion of the file system with file icons.

Enjoy

Our home page http://www.powershell.com may have some old information of it, but now that we have 1.0 out, we'll get that caught up soon.

Powershell Analyzer 1.0 and Powershell Plus Beta

2007-12-08T10:11:00Z

We have been busy, and now you can get Powershell Analyzer 1.0 and the latest Powershell Plus Beta.. Download a 45 Day trial, or get it as free for non commercial use.

for more information, and download links

http://powershelllive.com/blogs/shelltools/archive/2007/12/08/powershell-analyzer-1-0-and-powershell-plus-beta-available-for-free.aspx

Additionally Powershell Plus now has the option to auto update.

if you are interested in seeing a list of some of the changes in Powershell Plus check out the change log. http://www.powershell.com/plus/changelog.html

And in the coming weeks we'll be blogging and making videos about the new features in PowerShell Analyzer, including the code verification/parsing and PowerShell Analyzers debugger which is not traditional in the least, and quite different from the debugging in PowerShell Plus

-Karl

Free PowerShell+

2007-11-27T13:20:00Z

While attending ITForum in Barcelona, we received a lot of attention demoing PowerShell+. At the same time, a lot of community members expressed the need for a free-for-noncommercial-use PowerShell editor.

We hear you! PowerShell+ is free for non-commercial use effective now, and it will continue to be free, no ties attached. Just grab your copy at http://www.powershell.com/downloads/psp1.zip and join the fun!

And to those of you who never heared of PowerShell+ before: it is not just an editor. It is a true interactive console, letting you work with PowerShell interactively just the way PowerShell was designed.

To make this deal work, we believe in fair play. So if you or your company are using PowerShell+ commercially, please get yourself a license and help us continue our work on it.

Automatic PowerShell Error Parsing in PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShell Plus

2007-11-14T08:23:00Z

Powershell Analyzer 1.0 (which we intend on releasing by the end of November) and the latest beta of Powershell Plus have manual and automatic PowerShell language parsing, without even having to run your scripts!

Here is a small screenshot from Powershell Analyzer.

While Powershell Plus has a complete and traditional steppable debugger, Powershell Analyzer 1.0 contains a new twist on a debugger, that we feel might be more "powershelly". Stay tuned. Just a few of the things we are doing to help you be more productive and agile in your PowerShell work.

And just a reminder, Powershell Analyzer and Powershell Plus have been combined together into one purchase, called PowerShell Suite. Existing PowerShell Analyzer customers automatically get a free upgrade.

The ShellTools Team.

Visualizing Collections

2007-10-22T12:28:00Z

Automation languages are all about collections. You get collections when you ask for services, processes, whatnot. PowerShell Cmdlets return collections all the time. So why not visualize them and tie virtual context menus to them?

On my flight from Kopenhagen to Seattle it occured to me that a lot of what Quests PowerGUI does really is something I already implemented in SystemScripter three years ago: it visualizes collections in a grid view and lets you tie actions to the results. Back then I called that "Solutions", and SystemScripter visualizes COM collections in a treeview and adds actions as context menu. However, with PowerShell, the same technique is so much easier to develop because the results in any collection is always a PSObject. Back in the old COM world, I had to develop "object normalizers" much similar to PowerShells Extended Type System to get objects from COM, WMI, ADSI and other sources to play nicely with each other.

So I wondered if I could add this to PowerShell+ while I had to sit in that plane anyway and waste time by zipping away champagne. The results are pretty exciting. You can now have your own collections which essentially are PowerShell commands, and you can add context menu entries to each item in a collection. Note how I can just make a collection of my c# stuff and by right-clicking on a c# file, I can invoke a compilation. Each collection you see in that treeview really is just a powershell command, returning the collection. So to add my c# stuff node to the tree, all I added was this: Dir $home *.cs. I could have added all my c# files recursively by adding the -recurse and -filter parameters, you name it.

The actual context menu is generated dynamically for each item, and that is very cool. So you can have different commands for different types. For c# files, I wanted to be able to quickly compile dlls, so I added a context menu "compile" and added the PS code to dynamically call csc. From now on, all I need to do to compile stuff is right-click it. PowerShell+ automatically generates the PowerShell code which you can see in the right true console where it gets executed. I love it and am thinking about a ton of additional context commands for things I do every day. Saves time.

I also added a rich datagrid view while at it that you can fill by just typing a ps command. The example below is the result of dir $home *.cs again. The interesting part is not the grid that lets you explore object properties mich similar to our already integrated variable monitor. The really interesting part is that our dynamic context menus are "object-sensitive", so when you right-click on a grid item, PowerShell+ automatically senses that the grid item you selected matches to one or more commands, and so you get your context menu again and could compile a c# file from here, too. Likewise, if you had displayed exchange mailboxes or AD users, you could access all the commands for those as well.

There is a lot of exciting stuff going on, and our executive meeting has decided that we need to better explain our product strategy to our customers - that's you. Maybe you are wondering why we are working on two products: PowerShellAnalyzer and PowerShell+. One reason is what you have just seen: PowerShell is such a surprisingly fertile platform, it just takes a lot of R&D to embrace and exploit that. That's why we are developing two products from different angels at the same time. Eventually, they will merge, but until that happens, our customers will have access to both worlds. We call that "PowerShell Suite", and it contains both PSA and PS+ for the same one low price. Since PS+ isn't done yet, you get immediate access to the beta now and to the final product when it is released.

Our annual company meeting is over, so tomorrow I'll be flying back to Europe. Another 12 hours of spare time on the plane... I always wanted to add visual workflows...

Take care,
Tobias