Live PowerShell With Karl Prosser

Well its been six months or more since our baby PowerShell Plus grew up, left home and moved in with Idera. Well its been progressing nicely, and we are happy to see the vision being fulfilled,nd even expanded, with a successful commercial product. Go Tobias – Go Idera.

Anyhow, I’m pretty much going to reblog the content from Tobias’s blog entry below. If you haven’t tried PS+ yet. I recommend wholeheartedly that you do. It really is about 3 generations and a couple of years ahead of anything else out there. Other vendors have only recently implemented “borrowed” features that have been in PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShell Plus since 2006.

http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/news/archive/2009/02/02/powershellplus-v2-1-beta-is-live.aspx

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Exciting news! Effective immediately, PowerShellPlus v2.1 Beta is live and publicly available! Below you will find exciting information about an early look at what the PowerShellPlus team has been working on.

PowerShellPlus version 2.1 introduces several new and cool features focused on reducing the PowerShell learning curve, increasing the productivity of PowerShell development and exercising the capabilities of PowerShell 2.0. The new features include:

• Code sharing – Enables you to leverage the wealth of scripts that reside in the PowerShell.com and PoshCode.org libraries. Increase your productivity by quickly and easily searching and grabbing the scripts from those libraries. You can also submit your own scripts to the PowerShell.com library directly from PowerShell Plus Editor
• Visual Basic support – The PowerShell Plus Editor can now edit and run Visual Basic scripts
• STA mode support – Enables you to produce pretty cool looking GUI’s with Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) using PowerShell 2.0.
• PowerShell Assembly Detection – Gives the Learning Center an auto-upgrade path if PowerShell v2 CTP3 is detected and then displays the most up-to-date information
• Learning Center Auto-Load – Makes searching for a request with a single match much easier to use since the topic will load automatically, saving extra keystrokes
• Cmdlet parameter position – Shows you additional information in the code completion popup window about parameters including position and type
• Console size overlay – Shows you the height and width of the Console when you resize it
• Additional Sample Scripts - Active Directory, IIS 7.0 and MySQL
• PowerShell v2 CTP3 Support – Including Block Comments and the $Profile variable

How to get the New Version

Use the link at the bottom of this page to download the installation package, but before you do please read the following disclaimers, warnings and other general portents of doom.

• This software is a pre-release version and should not be deployed in a production environment. It will not work the way a final version of the software does. Features will change before the final release
• If you already have a PowerShellPlus license we recommend that you install this version on another machine, but we do support an upgrade in place your production version.
• If you upgrade your production version of 2.0 we will not overwrite any user customizations that have been made to PowerShellPlus but we do recommend you make a copy of the Sample scripts if you have modified them.
• A list of the changes is provided in the Release Notes in the Installation Package.
• This release is designed to provide the PowerShellPlus community with a preview of key features coming in 2.1 and to solicit feedback about them. This Technical Beta is not supported by the Idera Technical Support Team. Please visit the Beta Place: http://powershell.com/cs/forums/93.aspx

System Requirements

• Microsoft Windows PowerShell Version 1 or Version 2 CTP2 or CTP3
• Windows XP, Server 2003, Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7

Installation Instructions

To install PowerShellPlus:

1. Click the link at the bottom of this page and complete the download form
2. An email will be sent with instructions on how to download the Beta.
3. After downloading the Beta, unzip the contents of the Installer package.
4. Read the Release Notes for late breaking information about the Beta.
5. If you are upgrading from PowerShellPlus 2.0 make that you copy the Sample Scripts to another location, if you have modified them.
6. Run the Setup.exe program to install PowerShellPlus 2.1.

Grab your copy now:

Download Here

For feedback, bug reports, suggestions and discussions regarding this beta release, please visit and use our Beta Place:

http://powershell.com/cs/forums/93.aspx

Enjoy!

-Tobias

Help us decide which PowerShell tool to release next.

SURVEY: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pgTpVBomNgDwUA9uQNRKAbw&hl=en

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.

SURVEY: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pgTpVBomNgDwUA9uQNRKAbw&hl=en

-Karl

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.

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.

You can download Powershell Plus from http://www.powershell.com

-Karl

Technorati Tags: powershell,powershell plus,shell Tools,IDE,scripting

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.

So download both of these today and Enjoy

• 
  

  PowerShell Analyzer 1.0 – Direct Download

• 
  

  PowerShell Plus Beta – Direct Download

PowerShell Analyzer Screen-shots.

To get a grasp of what PowerShell Plus can do, Check out its trailer. its about 4 minutes, and definitely worth the time in our opinion.

Technorati Tags: Powershell Analyzer,Powershell Plus,Powershell Debugging

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.

So what’s new?

• I’ve been a PowerShell MVP for some time now.
• 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.

Technorati Tags: Powershell,Powershell Analyzer,Powershell Plus,Powershell debugger,Powershell Debugging,Shell Tools