WPF is to PowerShell as the PowerShell ISE is to Extensibility (Think "Extending the PowerShell ISE is as easy as 1, 2, DLL...")

Precision Computing - Creating Add-ons, Plugins, and Tools for the PowerShell ISE

We frequently get questions asking if the PowerShell ISE supports a feature that it doesn’t. For example, variable watch windows, function browsers, or “find all matches in the current document”.

Or as another example, many of you are very familiar with Visual Studio and naturally wish for Visual Studio feature <x>. That <x> is usually different for each person :) The Visual Studio team is many times larger than the PowerShell team, and they’ve had a 15-year head start.

When preparing for PowerShell V3, we realized that the appetite for new functionality in the ISE would far outstrip our ability to create it, so we designed one of the most (until now) un-heralded features in the PowerShell ISE: the ability to create custom tool windows:

See the “Find All” pane on the right-hand side? That didn’t come with the ISE.

Creating a PowerShell ISE Add-In / Plugin is very straight-forward. Jason gives a great overview in his blog: http://blog.codeassassin.com/2012/01/16/create-a-powershell-v3-ise-add-on-tool/.

The design center of ISE plugins are that they are really just WPF UserControls. In addition, they implement the IAddOnToolHostObject interface.

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After that, the control is all yours.

You have full access to WPF, XAML, C#, and anything else you can imagine or would expect from a WPF control. For example, here is the simplistic XAML used to create the control in the ‘Find All’ window shown above:

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All-in-all, a very easy development experience.

Once you’ve compiled a DLL, adding it to the ISE is as easy as:

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I though this post a great example of how easy it can be to extend the PowerShell ISE. I love seeing tools being extensible like this...