PowerShell tools for Visual Studio (poshtools) had a major release this month, the culmination of about six months of contributions from Microsoft employees. The highlights include:

• 64-bit support.
• Remote sessions.
• Remote debugging.
• IntelliSense improvements.

I switched from the Sapien Suite in early 2014 after changing jobs. Getting a new license wouldn’t have been difficult, but I was never thrilled with it and after re-examining the field of PowerShell editors it seemed like poshtools had crossed the “good enough” threshold. Plus I already was covered by a VS license. Score.

The only difficulty I’ve had during this time has been IntelliSense support: It was… particular. I don’t think it ever worked with Ctrl-Space and was instead triggered by - and $. I don’t think parameter hints for functions within a script ever worked. This release has fixed those things. Ctrl-Space works, and it works with script-defined functions and parameters. Hoorah!

If you need a good PowerShell editor, and you’re covered by a VS license or are eligible to use the Community Edition, now is a great time to take another look at poshtools. With a bunch of Microsoft employees making major contributions I expect it will be getting even better and at a much faster pace.

PowerShell has some very valuable features, but it is a mistake to believe that all those skills that you’ve derived from more conventional programming languages will transfer over to PowerShell. There are some pitfalls for the unwary. Michael Sorens warns abut the most common PowerShell pitfalls and explains how to avoid them.

https://www.simple-talk.com/sysadmin/powershell/a-plethora-of-powershell-pitfalls/

Ashamed to admin that I only caught #4 on my initial read, and I missed #1 because I skimmed Write-Output as Write-Host.