PowerShell for Visual Studio Code 1.0 – Your improved PowerShell ISE

Microsoft yesterday not only announced the new Azure Cloud Shell, Azure PowerShell 4.0, they also announced something I was waiting for a long time. Microsoft finally announced the version 1 of the PowerShell for Visual Studio Code with a lot for great enhancements. David Wilson describes this on the PowerShell Team blog.

This supports the PowerShell development on the following platforms:

• Windows 7 through 10 with PowerShell v3 and higher
• Linux with PowerShell v6 (all PowerShell-supported distributions)
• macOS and OS X with PowerShell v6

Features:

• PowerShell ISE-like interactive development experience with the PowerShell Integrated Console
• Rich debugging experience including variables view, call stack, watch window, and various breakpoint types
• Integrated script analysis and code fixes provided by PSScriptAnalyzer
• Code navigations that allow you to find definitions and references of functions across your script files
• Highly configurable code formatter based on community best practices
• New file and project creation using Plaster templates
• Editor scripting API through the $psEditor object model

The biggest thing about this for me, is the support to run code line by line, which will help a lot in demos and presentations.

So what does this mean for the PowerShell ISE?

The PowerShell ISE has been the official editor for PowerShell throughout most of the history of Windows PowerShell. Now with the advent of the cross-platform PowerShell Core, we need a new official editor that’s available across all supported OS platforms and versions. Visual Studio Code is now that editor and the majority of our effort will be focused there.
However, the PowerShell ISE will remain in Windows supporting Windows PowerShell with no plans to remove it. We will consider investing effort there in the future if there is a high demand for it, but for now we think that we will be able to provide the best possible experience to the PowerShell community through Visual Studio Code.

Really looking forward to work with PowerShell for Visual Studio Code.