Windows Developer Power Tools

23.10 Getting the Most out of PowerShell with PowerShell IDE

PowerShell is a powerful tool that gives developers control over everything from managing Exchange servers to automating various tasks on their local systems. However, IntelliSense and the benefits of a supportive IDE have spoiled us developers. It’s painful to drop back to the command line and lose things like IntelliSense and the ability to inspect variables.

Thankfully, Dr. Tobias Weltner of Scriptinternals created PowerShell IDE to help address precisely these issues. PowerShell IDE is a freeware environment that sits on top of PowerShell and gives you a great working environment.

PowerShell IDE at a Glance
Tool	PowerShell IDE
Version covered	1.0
Home page	http://www.powershell.com
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/172
Summary	Excellent IDE letting you work much more efficiently with PowerShell
License type	Freeware
Online resources	Forums
Supported Frameworks	.NET 2.0
Related tools in this book	PowerShell

Getting Started

Download the .zip distribution from the tool’s home page and extract it to a utility directory on your workstation. PowerShell IDE needs version 2.0 of the .NET Framework and PowerShell (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx) to run.

Tip

Please see 23.9 Bringing .NET to the Command Line with PowerShell for details on why PowerShell is a great thing to learn and how to go about using ...