August 20th, 2019

The PowerShell you know and love now with a side of Visual Studio

Ruben Rios
Ruben Rios
Senior Program Manager

While we know that many of you enjoy, and rely on the Visual Studio Command Prompt, some of you told us that you would prefer to have a PowerShell version of the tool. We are happy to share that in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.2, we added a new Developer PowerShell!

Using the new Developer PowerShell

We also added two new menu entries, providing quick access to not just the Developer PowerShell, but also for the Developer Command Prompt. These menu entries are located under Tools > Command Line.

C:\Users\rurios\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.MSO\7DF5E1ED.tmp

Also, you can access the Developer Command Prompt and Developer PowerShell via the search (Ctrl +Q):

Selecting either of these tools, will launch them in their respective external windows, and with all the predefined goodness (e.g. preset PATHs and environment variables) you already rely on.

Opening them from Visual Studio automatically adjust their directories based on current solution or folder’s location. Additionally, If no solution or folder is open at the time of invocation, their directories are set based on the “Projects location” setting. This setting is located under Tools > Options > Locations.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

We’d love to know how it fits your workflow. Please reach out if you have any suggestions or comments around how we could further improve the experience. Send us your feedback via the Developer Community portal or via the Help > Send Feedback feature inside Visual Studio.

Category
CloudExtensibilityVisual StudioWeb
Topics
AnnouncementDeveloper Command PromptPowerShellProductivity

Author

Ruben Rios
Ruben Rios
Senior Program Manager

Ruben is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio IDE platform team. During his time at Microsoft, he’s helped build tools and services for web & mobile devs in both Visual Studio and the Microsoft Edge F12 dev tools. Before joining Microsoft, he was a professional web developer and has always been passionate about UX.

25 comments

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  • Fakhrulhilal Maktum

    Why not supporting PowerShell Core? I believe this’s the next generation of powershell, more feature added in this version but not for old powershell.

  • Andre Raschke

    Kann mann die Powershell dirket mit in die IDE irgendwie “einbauen” als User? das wäre praktisch, dann könnte man sehen welche “ergebnisse ” bei gewissen Anwendungen sich ergeben. Ansonsten : sehr praktisch!

  • Frank Hileman

    Just updated Visual Studio to 16.2.4, and the developer command prompt doesn’t work at all. It seems a specific version of powershell is needed. Cannot load DevShell.dll, … the assembly was built with a newer run-time than the currently loaded one. What are the pre-requisites?

  • Teodor

    Is this working with powershell 6 (AKA Core) ?

    • Ruben RiosMicrosoft employee Author

      Hi Teodor! No, at this point we don’t offer support for PowerShell Core.

  • Ben Shirley

    Nice addition, for 5 stars however I’d like to do this without leaving my IDE.

    • Ruben RiosMicrosoft employee Author

      Thanks Ben! Hold your 5 stars as we might have some good news for you soon! 🙂

  • Wayne Hiller

    What we really need is for this same menu to be available when right clicking on a folder in the Solution explorer. When clicked the window would open to the selected folder. I have to just to folders so often to run npm or dotnet.

    • Ruben RiosMicrosoft employee Author

      Thanks for the feedback @Wayne! We have plans to add a similar feature (e.g. solution explorer support) with a new related experience we’ll announce soon. Stay tuned! 🙂

  • Travis Illig

    This doesn’t seem to be compatible with PowerShell Core. I can import the Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell.dll module, but when I run Enter-VsDevShell it tells me:
    The satellite assembly named “Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell.resources.dll, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d5a3a” for fallback culture “en” either could not be found or could not be loaded. This is generally a setup problem. Please consider reinstalling or repairing the application.

    • Ruben RiosMicrosoft employee Author

      Hi @Travis! Yes, we are aware of the lack of PowerShell Core support and while we don’t have any plans to share at the moment, we’ll continue monitoring feedback around this area and revisit things accordingly.

  • Dmitry Maslov

    Nice! really lacked this feature

  • Renato Golia

    Could you add the instructions to add the “Developer PowerShell for VS 2019” to the new Windows Terminal?

    • Ruben RiosMicrosoft employee Author

      Hi Retano! While I don't have instructions to fully add a profile to the new Windows Terminal, you can manually add the additional functionality to a regular PowerShell instance by inputing the command used to run the Developer PowerShell.
      For example, go to the location of your Developer PowerShell shortcut (e.g. C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Visual Studio 2019\Visual Studio Tools), open the shortcut Properties and look for the command information available under the shortcuts target information. In particular...

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  • Lorenzo Melato

    Great tip. Many Thanks.

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