PowerGUI 2.1: The release that keeps on giving

Last Monday while I was down at Tech·Ed we quietly released PowerGUI 2.1 on our website. I’ve been looking forward to us getting this release out the door for quite a while because there are some really cool features in the release that I wanted to share with you (some of which I’ve been hinting about on my blog recently), so it was very exciting to see this get released. Since it happened at Tech·Ed though, my schedule was completely booked and I just couldn’t find a minute to start blogging about the release. Now that I’m back home and fully recovered from a week packed with all sorts of cool technology, I can catch up and share this release with the rest of you.

Aside from the great performance improvements that were made in the Script Editor, not to mention the Charts and custom HTML support in the administrative console, there’s one particular feature that really grabbed my attention in this release: we now have a documented and supported SDK for the PowerGUI Script Editor! This is great news because up to this point the only extensions that were possible were in the administrative console where you could create PowerPacks. Now with 2.1 available anyone can create extensions for the Script Editor that add really cool functionality to it as well!

The screenshots I was blogging about a few weeks ago showed some of the Add-ons that I have been working on, and I just started publishing some of those Add-ons in the Script Editor Add-on category on PowerGUI.org. These Add-ons are just PowerShell modules so you can see exactly how they work by opening the module files in the Script Editor. With Add-ons, not only do you get the features that were implemented in the core product, you now get to pick and choose additional features that you want as they become available by installing Add-ons.

What sort of things can you do with Add-ons? Well, for starters you can sign your script files:

publish scripts online:

or change your embedded PowerShell Console to blue:

If that inspires you, you can also try creating your own Add-on:

And if you want to learn more about how you can create an Add-on, there’s even a tutorial available to help get you started.

There are some other useful Add-ons available right now, and more are in development so check the Script Editor Add-on category often to see what has been recently published.

If there are Add-ons you would like to see developed but you aren’t comfortable creating them yourself, share the ideas on our forums so that others can step up and help you out (or maybe even create the Add-on for you).

The Script Editor SDK that was added to this release is brand new to the PowerGUI product and we would love to hear your feedback on it. Please speak up and let us know what you think about the SDK, the Add-ons we have made available so far, or anything else related to PowerGUI. We’re always listening.

Thanks and happy scripting!

Kirk out.