Live PowerShell With Karl Prosser

After a long fight we finally conquered making PowerShell ISE portable also.

A new Beta of Portable PowerShell should be out by the end of the week that has ISE support and to celebrate we will open up the Beta group to another 100 users.

Go to http://groups.google.com/group/portable-powershell-beta to sign up to the google group. However be aware that the introduction words contain old info , and some bug in google groups is preventing me from updating it, however we’ll send out emails with the relevant information in it.

When we were selling PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShell Plus we used a standard shopping cart that we managed ourselves, generated license files with our own code, and emailed the customer. Managing these orders took a fair bit of time, but the biggest problem was often the emails that contained the purchased keys etc, didn’t get through. They got caught in spam filters and what not. It took A LOT OF EFFORT to manage these failures, and then when we sent out updates to our customers, because they were all sent out at the same time, services like hotmail thought they were spam and they never got through. This of course wasted our time as a vendor whose speciality is software, and frustrated our customers and wasted their time, and to those affected customers made us seem that we weren’t doing support or communicating with them, or even worse ripping them off.

So with us soon bringing Portable PowerShell to the market (as well as some other products including an exchange pop connector product) we want something better. Something that is less frustrating, that we don’t have to worry about building the sales software infrastructure or PCI stuff, something that just works well, is good value for money, is good for the customer etc. I know there must be untold services you there, that are tried and true and proven their worth to small software ISVs so we are asking for some suggestions.

Thanks in Advance,

Karl

UPDATE FEB 2010 We don’t need to rely on things like thinapp or app-v anymore. At ShellTools we have build our own Portable PowerShell framework. Its currently in Beta – see http://www.portablepowershell.com for more details.

What is it?

Portable PowerShell is software that allows you to run PowerShell on machines that don’t have PowerShell installed that you can run from a Machine that doesn’t have PowerShell on it, from a USB stick, on a machine that has a different version of PowerShell, a preinstall environment like BartPE, or WinPE or when booted to a windows 7 recovery DVD.

Why would I want it?

Administrators often cannot get their key tools, such as PowerShell installed in the environments they are working. This may be because a server installation has not yet been tested or approved, or the IT pro is working on a client’s environment, or a desktop support engineer is working on a machine that will likely not ever have PowerShell installed or enabled. Additionally you may want to run a different version of PowerShell than that installed, being able to do side by side work or comparisons when developing scripts. Having a thumb drive with portable PowerShell and all your own custom scripts with you at all times would be a dream come true to many administrators and IT pros.

How does it work?

You simple take our “PortablePowerShell” zip file and unzip it on a computer that already has PowerShell and Run “MakePortable.exe” and that will produce a folder containing everything you need to run PowerShell portable. From there you can just run it, or then copy it onto other computers, or onto a USB stick.

Does it use App-V or Thinapp?

Though we experimented with ThinApp and App-V for this very purpose a few years ago, we do not use either of those technologies as the past on licensing costs would be prohibitive for the majority of our customers. Instead we have crafted our own “Application Virtualization” particularly targeting the needs of the PowerShell engine.

What about PowerShell V2

In the future after the full release of PowerShell V2 we will release a version that will be able to produce a Portable PowerShell V2, however we made a Portable WinRM so V2 remoting will be limited or non-existent, however we are investigating what is needed to ensure that PowerShell V2 remoting will work.

What about Third Party Snapins?

Snap-in DLLs can be distributed with Portable PowerShell, and we have a configuration tool, and an XML configuration file that ensures that snapins get registered with the Portable PowerShell. However if the third party snapin’s installer puts other files in different places and maintains its own product registry , those snapins may not work. We do however provide a way that you can create and maintain virtual registry settings. We will set up a forum where instructions of including different snapins can be shared with the community. We are confident the majority of Third Party snapins will be able to be run, and we are willing to update the product to accommodate important but “difficult” snapins.

Other Features include ability to produce “custom portable PowerShell’s with special logging, specific scripts build in, scheduling etc.

So when can I get this and how much will it Cost?

ShellTools debuted with bring PowerShell Analyzer then PowerShellPlus, which is now produced and sold by Idera, successfully to market. We have a commitment to our customers, and we want to ensure that what we make lasts, and is feasible to maintain and support. We also learnt that bringing a product to market requires a lot more effort that just excellent software engineering. So basically we are now starting the process of working out whether ShellTools Portable PowerShell is commercially feasible and that we should bring it to market, or whether we just keep it as our own internal tool.

To help us decide could you please fill out the following survey? Additionally if you leave your email address with us in the survey you will likely be invited into the private Beta.

Link to Survey

Embedded Survey

Thanks,
The ShellTools Team.

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

—–
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

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.

Sincerely,

Karl

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