Even if you don’t like Microsoft or .Net, you have to admit that Visual Studio is a boss IDE. After being thrust into the world of scripting and PowerShell, it was disappointing to find the PowerShell support in Visual Studio to be lacking. Well, today I received a notice that Microsoft joined Adam Driscoll’s open source project, PowerShell Visual Studio Tools (PVST). They announced a release of a new version and I am ready to give it another go.

Adam makes note that Microsoft submitted a large pull request full of bug fixes and features. This project provides pretty nice PowerShell support inside my favorite IDE including:

• Edit, run and debug PowerShell scripts locally and remotely using the Visual Studio debugger
• Create projects for PowerShell scripts and modules
• Leverage Visual Studio’s locals, watch, call stack for your scripts and modules
• Use the PowerShell interactive REPL window to execute PowerShell scripts and command right from Visual Studio
• Automated Testing support using Pester
  From https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c9eb3ba8-0c59-4944-9a62-6eee37294597

You can download it for free from the Visual Studio Gallery. A quick double click install of the visx file you download and your ready.

My first test was to create a PowerShell project. In the Visual Studio New Project window there’s a new project template type, PowerShell. Inside of it are two templates: PowerShell Module Project and PowerShell Script Project.

Scripting and Debugging

I start with a script project and bang out a quick Hello World script to see debugging in action.

$myName = "Charles Bryant"
$myMessage = "How you doin?"

function HelloWorld($name, $message) {
  return "Hello World, my name is $name. $message"
}

HelloWorld $myName $myMessage

It feels very comfortable… like Visual Studio. I see IntelliSense, my theme works and I can see highlighting. I can set breakpoints, step in/over, see locals, watches, call stack, console output… feeling good because its doing what it said it can do and scripting PowerShell now feels a little like coding C#.

REPL Window

What about the REPL window. After a little searching, I found it tucked away on the menu: View > Other Windows > PowerShell Interactive Window. You can also get to it by Ctrl + Shift + \. I threw some quick scripts at it… ✓, it works too.

Unit Testing

Last thing I have time for is testing unit testing. First, I install Pester on the solution. Luckily there’s a NuGet package for that.

>Install-Package Pester

Then I create a simple test script file to test my Hello World script.

$here = Split-Path -Parent $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path
$sut = (Split-Path -Leaf $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path).Replace(".tests.", ".")
. "$here\$sut"

Describe "HelloWorld" {
 It "returns correct message" {
   HelloWorld "Charles Bryant" "How you doin?" | Should Be "Hello World, my name is Charles Bryant. How you doin?"
 }
}

Houston there’s a problem. When I open the Test Explorer I can see a bunch of tests that come with Pester, but I don’t see my little test. I try to reorganize the tests in the explorer and it freezes. Not sure if this is a problem with PVST, Pester, NuGet, Visual Studio, or user error… oh well. I can’t say it is a problem with PVST because I didn’t try to find out what was wrong (I still have work to do for my day job).

Conclusion

OK, unit testing isn’t as intuitive as the other operations, hence the Almost in the title. It will feel complete when I get unit testing working for me, but none the less, I like this tool a lot so far. I will definitely be watching it. If I see something up to my skills that I can contribute, I will definitely pitch in as this is something I can definitely use.