A few days ago Jason Helmick asked Jeffery Snover on the MCP Insider Series when we’d see PowerShell in Visual Studio.  That actually wasn’t the first time the question had been asked.  Well, here’s the answer…  Today at the PowerShell Summit North America 2015, Andre Sayre gave a demo of PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio, an extension for Visual Studio that provides edit, run and debug capabilities for PowerShell scripts and modules in the Visual Studio IDE. 

Over the past few months we (at Microsoft) have been working with Adam Driscoll, a Microsoft MVP who started this extension back in 2013.  Adam released it as open source on GitHub and a few months ago Microsoft created a fork to join community and contribute to the project.

Here are some highlights:

• Edit, run and debug PowerShell scripts locally and remotely using the Visual Studio debugger
• Create projects for PowerShell scripts and modules
• Leverage Visual Studio’s locals, watch, call stack for your scripts and modules
• Use the PowerShell interactive REPL window to execute PowerShell scripts and commands right from Visual Studio
• Automated testing support using Pester

If you’re ready to try it out go download it from the Visual Studio Gallery and let us know what you think.  Also, feel free to create your own fork and join the fun.

Brian Moore
Senior Program Manager
Azure Tools For Visual Studio