There are many tools available to write PowerShell code or even to create PowerShell-based GUIs. Many administrators just stick to the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE), but there are also a lot of other different tools available. Therefore, I want to give an overview with a small description of each tool and also make a recommendation.
The following list is not an exhaustive list of tools but includes tools the authors have personal experience with. When choosing the proper tool for scripting, we can only recommend testing the tool in your day-to-day work properly before. Free and open source tools might, for example, be superior to paid tools or might be a better fit for your scripting style:
|
PowerShell Console |
Free |
The PowerShell Console is the most basic tool for executing PowerShell commands. Just open PowerShell.exe from Command Prompt to start using it. It provides IntelliSense (shows command suggestions when writing) and integrated help. It is lacking any UI options and is therefore just an option to open and use PowerShell in an interactive way. |
|
ISE PowerShell |
Free |
PowerShell ISE comes with all Windows versions that are being used today. It provides a good rudimentary feature set, which helps for most scenarios. |
| ISE PowerShell + ISESteroids |
With costs |
ISESteroids is an add-on from Tobias Weltner, which brings many additional features to the ISE, especially for professional and faster coding. This combination has been my preferred tool for years, but was recently replaced by Visual Studio Code. |
|
Visual Studio 2017 Community/Professional |
Free/with costs |
Visual Studio is the complete development environment, which every developer loves. It might be overwhelming in terms of features and functions, and is therefore very rarely used. You need to install the PowerShell extension to get language assistance within Visual Studio. |
| Visual Studio Code |
Free |
This is probably the best tool for PowerShell scripting. You can create PowerShell scripts with it after having the PowerShell extension installed. We will get into this tool in depth. I use this tool on a daily basis and would never replace it. |
| SAPIEN PowerShell Studio | With costs |
PowerShell Studio is very often used by administrators to create professional GUIs. Though I personally never used it for a long period of time, it is very well known as one of the best tools to create PowerShell-based GUIs. Its latest version also provides support for PowerShell Core 6. |
| SAPIEN Primal Script 2017 |
With costs |
Primal Script is a professional editor that supports over 50 languages and file types. From my experience it is quite a useful editor, but not as frequently used as the other ones. |
| PoshGUI | Free |
PoshGUI is a great web-based tool to create code for PowerShell-based GUIs that are working on Windows Forms. It can be found at https://poshgui.com/. You should use it if you want to very quickly create these types of GUIs or want to learn how they are created, as you can take the created code as a learning resource. |
| PowerGUI | Free |
PowerGUI was a very good tool, which also provided additional features for working with WMI or converting VBS into PowerShell. Unfortunately, it is not continued anymore and therefore you should not spend too much time with it. |
| Admin Script Editor | Free |
This is very rarely used editor. |
As you can see, there is a vast list of possible tools available. Most administrators and IT-professionals have been using and probably still are using the ISE. In addition, we are seeing huge investments made into VSCode and an increasing adoption rate of this new tool, as well. Therefore, we will focus on these specific two tools, as both are also available cost-free.