Arcane Code

Over the next few blog posts I thought I’d present some of the various PowerShell IDE’s on the market. Yes, that’s right, there’s more out there then just the IDE that ships with PowerShell. I thought I’d kick things off with the “Cadillac” of tools, SAPIEN PowerShell Studio 2012.

This by far is the most comprehensive tool of any on the market. It’s key selling point is the ability to quickly and easily create Windows Forms that can be called from, and raise events in, your PowerShell scripts.

OK, I can already hear you. “Hey Robert this is supposed to be scripts, what do we need Windows Forms for?” That’s a great question.

A very common task to do in scripting is the creation of virtual machines. You can imagine though all of the things you would need to enter in order to create the machine. What’s the name? What’s the activation key? What do you want installed? SQL Server? SharePoint?

You could, of course, have the script prompt you one question at a time. Or have a vast array of command line switches and parameters you need to enter just right in order to run the script. You could reduce complexity by having multiple scripts, but then you increase the workload. Then there’s the issue of who is going to run the script.

It would be far preferable to have a simple, single windows dialog pop up and ask all these questions at once. The person running the script could enter the information in any order, and when they were done just click an big OK button to launch the script.

This also expands the sphere of people who can run the script. Now you will be able to let an experienced PowerShell developer create the complex script, then give it to someone who may not even know PowerShell. They just run a single command, enter in some information into an easy to understand Windows Form, and they are off and running.

But Windows Forms are just the tip of the iceberg. For example, PowerShell Studio makes it easy to package your scripts into executables. Yep, you can take all your proprietary code and keep it safe from prying eyes by compiling it into an easy to distribute EXE file. 

It also has the ability to run your scripts in either 32 or 64 bit mode, all within the same editor. Very nice if you are having to support older systems as well as more modern ones.

From a development standpoint, it has the nice feature of organizing your scripts into projects. This makes management of them much easier.

It has an outstanding editor, with a great help system, and a snippet library loaded up with snippet goodness. The object browser is one of my favorite features. Using it you can drill down into not only PowerShell objects, but .Net, WMI, the file system, and even databases. I find this incredibly useful, I can quickly lookup info without having to leave my IDE.

I will admit that at $349 (as I write this), it’s not the cheapest of the PowerShell IDE’s on the market. However I’m a firm believer in “you get what you pay for”. This price is low enough that it should be a no brainer for any sized company, from a huge multinational corporation to a single person consultant. By taking advantage of the features in SAPIEN’s PowerShell Studio 2012 you’ll recap that back in a very short time.

Without a doubt this is the most feature rich PowerShell IDE I’ve seen. It seems to have everything but the kitchen sink. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s in there too and I just haven’t found it yet.

As a consultant I travel a lot, and am usually on my small laptop with it’s 13 inch screen. A great size for travel, but a bit small on occasion. Doing PowerShell I often want to look things up, but it’s a pain having to jump back and forth between my editor and the help.

I have e-books on PowerShell which I can read on my various e-book devices, but as you might expect with a book they are not highly interactive. So the other day I ran across a solution for, of all things, my iPad.

It’s called iPowerShell, from the folks at Sapien. It was less than five dollars (US), and they have both iPad and iPhone / iPod Touch versions. It provides interactive access to the PowerShell help system, allowing you to quickly drill down into Cmdlets, Aliases, Providers, and more.

What I love most about iPowerShell is it’s extensibility. It uses the standard PowerShell help file format. That means you can write your own custom help files and use them not just in regular PowerShell but iPowerShell and other products that incorporate standard help.

This brings up some great possibilities. Many companies have generated their own set of custom modules and cmdlets. Often they have already created help files to go with them. Now those same help files can be used by simply importing them into iPowerShell.

If I had any wishes for iPowerShell, there’s be two. First, it’d be nice to have the basic syntax included. For example, there’s two ways to do the foreach command, it’d be nice to have those documented for easy lookup in iPowerShell. Second, right now the cmdlets are sorted alphabetically by the verbs. It’d be nice if there was a way to have them sorted by the nouns. There is a search feature though, which greatly alleviates that need.

Incidentally I found out about the tool because of my post on PowerShell Training. Over on the BIDN version of the post, a reader had posted a link to Windows PowerShell 2.0 TFM by Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks. This is an extremely comprehensive book, one that I immediately bought and have been reading ever since (hence explaining why I was up until 2 am this morning). You can get it in PDF format directly from Sapien at the link above, or in print format from Amazon. Highly recommended.

Sapien has some other cool, free community tools I plan to blog about in the near future, so stay tuned. In the meantime if you are both a PowerShell coder and iPod / iPhone / iPod Touch owner I think you’ll enjoy this inexpensive app.