On TweetGrid I noticed Jeffrey Snover ask someone to blog about what they would have liked to see in the latest drop of the Powershell ISE.  He didn't ask me, but I'll blog about it anyway. ;)

Wishlist:

• Expand/Collapse of:
  • Comments
  • Functions
  • Regions
  • All
• Import/Export/Customization of Environment Settings (much like Visual Studio)
  • I really really really like to code in this environment
  • Use Visual Studio format so they are interchangeable.
• Indication of Opening/Closing Brackets,Parenthesis,Scriptblocks,etc
  • When the cursor is next to the opening, the closing is also highlighted.
• Full XML editor support (Pulled from MSDN)
  • Design time well-formedness and validation errors.
  • Context-sensitive Intellisense.
  • Validation support for Schema, DTD, and XDR.
• Intellisense, Intellisense, Intellisense
  • I think we all know what's needed here.  Intellisense on everything.  The more the merrier.
• Dockable panels
• Current Runspace Variables
• Properties

-Shane

In the previous blog, we had some issues with CTP1 and remote runspace stability.  While looking for alternatives, I remembered nSoftware’s Powershell Server.  After reading the info on their website, I decided to download it and try it out.

First off.  NetCmdlets CANNOT create runspaces on remote machines without Powershell Server.  The website is a bit misleading since they list the Cmdlets to connect to a SSH Runspace but if the SSH Runspace service is not running on the remote machine, you get no joy.  I will give them the fact that they do say in their New-SSHRunspace description that you need Powershell Server.

Now the install.  Installation was a snap for both NetCmdlets and Powershell Server.  Powershell Server has a nice option to run as a service so it’s waiting for connections at startup.  I tried to set the service to interact with the desktop but the service won’t start once that option is checked.  Was worth a try.

I noticed some differences between the two products in that they return two different object types when using the runspaces depending on which Cmdlets are used.  New-SSHRunspace is one Cmdlet.

New-PowershellServerRunspace is the other Cmdlet.

The first type of runspace (SSHRunspace) seems to return objects as their own homegrown ShellObject.

The next runspace type(PowershellServer) is more familiar to us as it returns the process objects as it normally would in the Powershell Host.

As you can see, there are subtle differences between the two runspace Cmdlets but overall, this product is able to do everything I’ve thrown at it thus far.  More testing to come.

-Shane