Though we don’t have intentions to carry developing PowerShell Analyzer much in the future, there are a number of improvements in my personal fork, and we want to make sure that it keeps its shelf life by updating it for PowerShell V2. Surprisingly we are still getting hundreds of downloads a day so we want to make sure that those who prefer PSA can still keep using it and also take advantage of the features I use day in and day out. We’ll probably release some new builds within the next couple of weeks, but will post some screenshots and maybe videos until then. We hope that will minimal effort keep PSA the best free PowerShell tool. However if want a tool that is definitely worth paying for check out PowerShell Plus at its new home at Idera – http://www.idera.com/Products/PowerShell/
So here is a screenshot of PowerShell Analyzer running with PowerShell V2 CTP3. The new features are all related to the help features of advanced Functions.
Region support for multiline comments <# #>
Syntax Coloring for help documenting keywords (i.e. .DESCRIPTION )
Code Completion for help documenting keywords.
Rich Rendering of advanced function help from get-help in HTML (any advanced function that is in the RunSpace)
So there. you go. However the help rendering is only in our really old 3 year old Help rendering engine. If you like it wait for our HelpFusion app which will be separate and be able to be used independently or from any PowerShell host. Some of you have seen it, but the rest of you will have to wait until we finish rewriting it for WPF.
Taking an app from an internal application to a shrink-wrap ready for
the masses state is a lot of work, and updating/supporting/marketting
a product even more so. So after the huge sucess of PowerShell Plus
which is now safe in Idera’s hands we need your help to decide what we
are going to release next. We plan to release some free projects, even
some opensource apps, but will likely look at productizing a project
so we can continue to feed our families. Please take the time to take
our survey
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As many of you know, PowerShell Plus has been a great success and is
now developed and sold by Idera, and we’ve made PowerShell Analyzer
100% free!. Despite PowerShell Analyzer not having much active
development done for almost 2 years, surprisingly it is still very
popular with a large user base. Based on your feedback and the
following thoughts we need to decide where to invest our development
time, and which internal prototypes to bring to the community.
• We have invested a lot into PowerShell Plus, from vision and
incubation to a mature product and we don’t want to compete in the
marketplace directly with PowerShell Plus.
• PowerShell editors are now a generic commodity. In addition to
the awesome PowerShell plus. There are many free “good enough”
solutions, including some open source ones, Microsoft’s upcoming
Graphical PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment and some other
“lower common denominator” solutions that are still free.
• We have created and continue to innovate PowerShell technology
that can live just as well outside an editor product as in one.
There are many questions on here. Feel free to not answer them all,
it’s the top questions that are most important to us, but the more you
fill in, the happier you’ll make us.
With the phenomenal success of PowerShell Plus and subsequent transfer to Idera, PowerShell Analyzer is now 100% free. You can read more and get it from our recently updated website – http://www.shelltools.net . In coming weeks we are going to do some surveys to help decide where we want to go as a company with PowerShell IDEs.
One of our goals is to bring the most important functionality of PowerShell Analyzer over to PowerShell plus as we consolidate into one product. Here is one example. It looks a little different than in PowerShell Analyzer , but we feel its just as useful, and it has a few new features added to it.
In PowerShell Plus you can see Variables and properties. by enabling it from the menu (Toolbars->Variables+Property) or easily toggle it with CTRL-T
You can see it has rich features where you can search and filter different variables, then when you click on one have it show up in the property grid. However we aren’t going deep into that today. we are covering the “View Current Pipeline” option
When you click this button, it toggles from showing the variables. to the actual results of the pipeline. So whenever you run something.. the actual results are shown as usual on the left as text, but also the actual dotnet objects that are returned by the command show up in the variable pane. and when you click on an item there, you can see all the properties for that particular object.
So in the above example I ran a command that on the first 5 processes in the system, and the current date. In the variable explorer you can see those 5 processes and the date and time. Also the 2nd process has been clicked on, and you can see all its properties in the property grid, including descriptions of the properties. You get to see a lot more data than PowerShell gives you as text.
PowerShell Analyzer 1.0 is finally released. For a week or two we consider this a “soft” launch, just in case there is some major issue that eluded our testing, but we are pretty confident its stable.
Additionally, if you have already used your 45 Day trial, we have EXTENDED it another 45 days.
PowerShell Plus is now available with a 45 Day trial as well, and Additionally its available fully free for Non Commercial use as well.
Finally my main blog is back in Business. I had gotten discouraged with my previous web host and abundant comment spam, and just plain being busy. But now with the help of an updated WordPress, new Host and Windows Live Writer all should be good.
All my old posts are gone, as far as being web pages, but I have archived them into a PDF here. Maybe I’ll revisit some of the topics in future posts if they are worthy enough.
Shell Tools is sponsoring the PowerShell.org project. Actually I have a blog there, and was going to blog there rather than back at www.karlprosser.com/coder but I really wanted to use Live Writer, and the DotNetNuke Blog module is still substandard, so I’m just going to cross post here and there, and also at Shell Tools support site, so its searchable on this blog. I know its OVERKILL . We’ll see how it works out.
We’ve been busy with PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShell Plus. PowerShell Analyzer 1.0 is finally out, and we have a trial of the PowerShell Plus for use in a commercial environment, and a free license for non-commercial use. Check it all out www.powershell.com
Combined PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShell Plus downloads are now far in excess of 100,000. Yay
The PowerShell Debugger in PowerShell Plus is getting better by the day, and the debugger in PowerShell Analyzer should add an interesting twist to the works. More on this in future posts.
Documentation. We admit documentation for PowerShell Plus and PowerShell Analyzer is very sparse, so one of our priorities as this year wraps up is a number of Video Tutorials, and even some hard copy documentation/ tutorials – shock , horror.
Plus I have tonnes of generic PowerShell topics inside me, bursting at the seams, just waiting to come out.
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