Visual Studio Code: PowerShell Extension provides a walkthrough guide

Microsoft has provided its PowerShell Extension for Visual Studio Code with the August update. The extension for the source code editor brings some new functions and is intended to make it easier for newcomers to use PowerShell in Visual Studio Code. The extension offers, among other things, syntax highlighting, code snippets, IntelliSense for cmdlets and local script debugging.

According to the description, it should run on all platforms that support VS Code and PowerShell Core 7 or higher. Windows PowerShell is only supported for version 5.1. PowerShell Core 6 has already reached its end of life date and therefore cannot be used. Just a few months ago, Microsoft did extensive work and overhauled the core engine for Visual Studio Code’s PowerShell extension.

Walkthrough and library update

Based on customer surveys and interviews, Microsoft has now equipped the Power Shell extension with a walkthrough experience. This can be from the Getting StartedAccess page in Visual Studio Code. It can also be accessed from the command palette.

Also new is a major update of the LSP client library dependency vscode-languageclient. The extension relies on this library to start, connect to, and communicate with the PowerShell Editor Services LSP server. The update is intended to prevent some race conditions that could occur during startup, because the new version allows notification and request handlers to be registered before the server starts.

Bug fixes and other new features

The August update of the extension fixes some existing bugs. For example, previously the occurrence of an error in the promptfunction caused REPL to crash and DiagnosticMarkers was duplicated when reopening a file. Additional regression tests and end-to-end integration tests are now also possible with Vim.

The PowerShell Extension can be downloaded from the Visual Studio Marketplace. All information on the updated version can be found in a blog entry.