A small developer-oriented PowerShell wish list

I have just started to use the PowerShell a few days ago; and I am more and more impressed by the work that have been done by the MS folks. Yet, being a developer, I have the feeling that many aspects of PowerShell still need to be polished.

• Too bad that there is no Visual Studio project templates for CmdLets. Providing an hello-world CmdLet with its associated SnapIn would really make the life of the developers easier, smoothing the learning curve.

• Implementing a CmdLet is so full of traps, I would really see some strong FxCop support to help the poor developers to avoid the most obvious errors.

• A few objects dedicated to CmdLet unit testing. Currently, in order to get a CmdLet unit tested, you have to resort to some custom tricks. A small dedicated & embedded testing framework would ensure that the CmdLet environment is simulated in a proper manner.

• A dedicated MSBuild task to include whole PowerShell scripts (using the CDATA); the MSBuild properties being inherited as PowerShell variables. MSBuild and PowerShell do have very complementary design; integration would be the key to leverage both of them.

• Some XSLT convertion to transform the .Net documentation produced by the compiler into CmdLet Help documentation. In the current situation, the CmdLet documentation end-up duplicated in the .Net source and in the CmdLet XML documentation file.

Reader Comments (1)

Item 1: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PowerShellCMDLETVisualStudio2005ItemTemplate.aspx November 8, 2006 | Mark Ayers