I recently spent a bit of time digging into managing/updating SharePoint 2010 with PowerShell. The native PowerShell ISE is a decent enough tool, but doesn’t have several important features that make it easier to develop PowerShell scripts. One such feature is “IntelliSense” for specific object types.
Luckily for me, I discovered PowerGUI, a free PowerShell editing environment that is a significant improvement over the native PowerShell tools.
The first time you use objects in a script, PowerGUI does not detect object types and intellisense is not available. However, run the script just once, and, lo and behold, you have intellisense – which ends up being a huge help – as anyone who compared the bare-bones Notepad approach to development to Visual Studio.
Additionally, PowerGui Script Editor provides color-coding, access to values of built-in variables, and an integrated PowerShell Console – all very helpful additions to your scripting environment.
There’s a Pro version of PowerGUI that I have yet to use, so I don’t know what additional benefits the paid version grants you.
I also found a Visual Studio project template for PowerShell script project (the template requires PowerGUI to be pre-installed). I haven’t spent a lot of time with the template as I use PowerGUI instead, but I can see it being useful on projects where you prefer to keep your scripts and .NET development projects in the same solution, and want to take advantage of the your source control system using existing VS SCC framework.
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