Recap of the Dec 2015 PowerShell Editor Services Hack Week
Thanks to all those who participated in the PowerShell Editor Services Hack Week last week! Much progress was made on fixing bugs and adding new features to both PowerShell Editor Services and the PowerShell extension for Visual Studio Code. Here’s a quick summary of the contributions that were made during the week:
Variable Display Improvements in the Debugger
Keith Hill made many great improvements to how we display variable contents in the Visual Studio Code debugger. First of all, he added support for variable scopes other than just “Local” as we had before. You can now inspect variables from both the Global and Script scopes. You will also see a special “Auto” section which filters the set of variables down to those that were defined in the current scope. This is really helpful for quickly checking the state of the variables in your functions!
He also added greatly improved the variable value display for collections such as arrays and dictionaries and also objects which implement the ToString() method in .NET. You will now see much greater detail for these variables in the debugger:
New Expand Aliases Command
Doug Finke contributed a new “Expand Aliases” command which searches your script file or selection for the use of cmdlet aliases. For any alias it finds, it replaces the text with the full command name. This is helpful for developers who want to quickly write out scripts using aliases but resolve them to their command names before committing to source control.
Here’s a GIF of the feature in action (click to play!):
Sublime Text Editor Integration
Work on the integration of PowerShell Editor Services in Sublime Text has progressed quite well this week. The basic protocol implementation is now working, enabling language features to be integrated over time. I’ve also implemented basic file management support so that opened files are sent to Editor Services for syntax checking and semantic analysis. From this point it’s just a matter of integrating the language features of PowerShell Editor Services into Sublime’s UI using its plugin API.
Check out the current code in the editor-services branch of my fork of the PowerShell Sublime Text package. Once this effort is stable enough for an initial release, I’ll be submitting a PR back to the original PowerShell Sublime Text package repo and future work will continue there.
Atom Editor Integration
Some work was started on an integration with the Atom editor but it was quickly determine that Atom’s APIs for language features were to sparse to make quick progress. However, with the experience gained from the Sublime Text integration, future work on the Atom integration should be much easier. Expect to see more effort in this area in the first half of 2016.
Miscellaneous Improvements
- Mateusz Świetlicki improved the “Run Selection” command so that it will run the line that the user’s cursor is sitting on if there is no text selection
- The default set of Script Analyzer rules used for semantic analysis has been reduced to provide helpful hints without giving too much feedback. (In the future the rule set will be completely configurable.)
- A set of bugs around code completion text replacements were fixed so that using IntelliSense no longer eats your code 🙂
New Releases
As promised, I’ve prepared new releases of both PowerShell Editor Services and the PowerShell extension for Visual Studio Code which contain all of the contributions made during these week. The new NuGet packages for PowerShell Editor Services have been released on NuGet today (see the following changelog link). The Visual Studio Code extension will be released once a publishing issue has been resolved.
Here are the changelog entries for both releases:
Looking Ahead
Overall I am very impressed with the work that we accomplished this week even though there wasn’t a large amount of contributors. My guess is that PowerShell fans would feel more comfortable contributing by writing PowerShell rather than C#. I’ve got some ideas on how to make this possible in the future so keep an eye out for another Hack Week next year!
Thanks again to all the contributors and to all the users of these projects!
Related Articles
A New Home for Plaster
Some of you may be familiar with the Plaster PowerShell module. This slick tool lets you build out a new module in seconds. Actually, Plaster can be used to scaffold a framework for any type of project. You can install the current version from the PowerShell Gallery. However, the project has been in limbo for a while with no updates or progress. After discussions with the PowerShell Team about the module, a decision was made to transfer ownership to the PowerShell community.
Secure Your Powershell Session with JEA and Constrained Endpoints
Index What is a Constrained Endpoint and Why Would I Need One? Setup and Configuration Using our Endpoint What is a constrained endpoint and why would I need one? Powershell constrained endpoints are a means of interacting with powershell in a manner consistent with the principal of least privilege. In Powershell terms, this is referred to as Just-Enough-Administration, or JEA. JEA is very well documented, so this won’t simply be repeating everything those references detail.
Running Universal Dashboard with Ubuntu and Nginx (With HTTPS!)
A basic UniversalDashboard running on nginx Index Prerequisites Configuration HTTPS (Optional) Prerequisites For this writeup, I’m using Ubuntu 18.04. Software packages are geared toward using that version. First, we’ll need to install our dependencies There are several ways to install Powershell core on Ubuntu. I recommend Microsoft’s documentation for ubuntu 18.04 here Once installed, enter Powershell and install the UniversalDashboard module. This will use the community edition. pwsh PS> Install-Module UniversalDashboard.