New 'Getting Started' Walkthrough Unveiled for VS Code PowerShell Tool -- Visual Studio Magazine

New 'Getting Started' Walkthrough Unveiled for VS Code PowerShell Tool

By David Ramel
08/30/2022

A new "getting started" experience highlights the August 2022 update to the PowerShell Extension for Visual Studio Code.

Other new things for the tool -- available in the VS Code Marketplace -- include more regression tests, a major Language Server Protocol (LSP) client library update and various bug fixes. The extension has been installed nearly 6.5 million times.

"As a part of this release we have introduced a getting started experience for PowerShell in VS Code," Microsoft said in an Aug. 30 blog post. "This experience was designed through a series of customer surveys and interviews conducted by our summer intern. The walkthrough can be accessed on the Getting Started page in VS Code, or through the command pallette."

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Get Started with PowerShell *(source: Microsoft).*

Microsoft is definitely focusing on providing developers with more introductory guidance and information for PowerShell, as the new walkthrough comes fresh on the heels of a new "Get-WhatsNew" Cmdlet to help users stay informed about new features.

The company is seeking feedback on the new walkthrough in order to guide future improvements.

The dev team also updated its LSP client library dependency, vscode-languageclient, a library used by the extension to start, connect and communicate with the LSP server, PowerShell Editor Services.

"By incorporating this update in vscode-powershell #4128 we were able to prevent a number of race conditions that could be encountered during startup, as the latest version of this library allows us to register our notification and request handlers before starting the server," Microsoft said. "The lifecycle management code was also given some much needed attention, and so startup and shut-down is now a more stable experience."

New regression tests, meanwhile, are detailed in these pull requests:

PowerShellEditorServices #1872 Add regression tests for parse error DiagnosticMarkers.
PowerShellEditorServices #1867 -- Add regression test for when prompt is undefined.

For any issues with the extension -- or feature requests, bug reports or questions -- developers can provide feedback in the extension's GitHub repository.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.