Thanks for the insight into shellid and the advice to use Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 which seems cleaner than the “if ($Shellid -ne ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.PowerShell.sqlps’)” approach I had taken especially since Microsoft is releasing mini-shells like sqlps.exe.

By the way, (I posted this in your WorkItem too) depending on what other PowerShell hosts you use, you might want to move the loading of the PSCX profile stuff into a separate script which gets called from Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 (and/or other host-specific profile scripts). That way it wouldn’t get loaded by the SQLPS (Profile.ps1 is supposed to be host-agnostic). I must admit though, a host that doesn’t do snapins feels a little pointless to me

http://www.codeplex.com/PowerShellCX/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=18417

I could even throw my own errors to make it look roughly the same as a #requires statement would look.

The thing is, there’s a built-in mechanism for handling requirements like this … and I can’t make it work! (And that’s driving my crazy).

Of course, on top of the “it should be easy” argument (which seems to indicate that this system is designed wrong) ... we’ve been discussing the ability to filter search results on PoshCode.org based on requirements, which would work if we could parse for #requires statements, but wouldn’t have any way of knowing that an if() statement was actually a requirement instead of just a logic branch — so I’d really like the #requires system to work

Perhaps a global variable signifying that your shell is capable of graphics in the shell output is a reasonable workaround? It would mean that each Cmdlet would need to check for it.