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