PowerShell 7 ISE - A real conversation

[u/AccomplishedMeet628]

Hi Everyone,

I think I need to have a reset on the way I introduced myself and my goal.

I am new to reddit and pretty much the entire open source community. I am an old school COBOL developer from the early 80's. I also know Visual Basic (about 15 years) and C# (about 4). I work on mainframes and z/OS on distributed systems (Linux). I maintain distributed apps for clients and sometimes on the mainframe. Not so much the mainframe anymore.

I use PowerShell every day. My shop uses PowerShell every day. We have 1000's of scripts, all written in 5.x that are years old.

They are not complex scripts, we don't have an Admin running a server farm or anything like that. They are just scripts that we use to make our jobs easier. Scanning files for codepages, finding Dupes using Hashes, things like that. When we run them, we use the old PowerShell ISE. We are used to it. It's easy, it looks good and it makes changing and running the script a smooth effortless event. The only issue is, that our shop has been slowly making us move away from 5.x to 7.x. This has been going on for years. I'm not happy because I lose my clean, crisp, no headache comfortable ISE. Yes, I said comfortable. I like it. We all do (at my shop). I tried to use the PowerShell plugin for VS Code. I did not like it. I really did not. So about a year or so ago, I decided to code my own. My goal was simple. I wanted to make a Daily Driver ISE for PS 7. Yes, I am going to share it with my co-workers once its finished and yes, I can and have asked a few of them to help me test it. I have gotten some good feedback from them. Not quite what I needed though. We are a simple shop, we do not do anything overly complicated and my co-workers are less than impressed with what I have shown them so far. It was buggy and did not have the feel of the ISE GUI. I felt that maybe if I turned to the PowerShell community for help, I could improve things. Actually make an App that we could use daily and transition from 5.x to 7.x without a blink.

I still want that.

I should not have started out asking if anyone still used the old ISE. That was the wrong approach, I acknowledge that. I should have just told you all my goal and left it at that.

I'm not asking anyone to jump on my bandwagon. My goal is simple, make something of value to more than just myself.

All I'm asking is, can you help me make it better.

If this post crosses a line, that crossing was unintentional. Let me know and I will walk away.

Regards,

-Ron

[u/Medium-Comfortable]

My perspective. Nice that you say this here and your goals might be worth looking into, for your shop and maybe a fringe group of people out there. My guess (!) is, that most others moved on.

ISE was, for me at least, always problematic, as sometimes things would work during a script run and not ISE or the other way around. Next to that, I’ll not rely on a third part tool that has no backing from a large Open Source community or a paid actor with contracts and guarantees. My scripts are stand alone or toolboxes and I can handle the situation just fine w/o a crotch. ISE was never anything I used much, and what for even?

As much as I appreciate the effort, I don’t see anything that draws me to it. And as a consultant, I couldn’t “sell” anything to a customer that’s not in a way reliably backed. Whatever solution is part of our project must be on very, very solid ground. Preferably backed by Microsoft, else we sell code that was written by us, not relying on a hobby product (no offense).