So, I’ve been practically invisible for a few weeks here, and liable to be invisible for at least one more week … this is my vacation time, so it’s hard to motivate myself to blog about anything. However, I have been spending some time working on a side project: a PowerShell Host.

Now, there are a few other hosts out there, but with PowerShell Analyzer seemingly swallowing up PowerShell IDE and going the fifty dollar route … as an open sourcer and contributor to the PowerShell Community Extensions it seemed to me that this couldn’t be that hard, so I started looking for an open source implementation of PSHostRawUserInterface and couldn’t find one. I mean, there are a couple of implementations out there, but essentially they are the PowerShell Remoting interface (which actually runs inside PowerShell.exe, and thus doesn’t seem to implement anything itself) and a half-implemented console block from a Japanese file manager called kuon …

So, being myself, I stepped in an implemented it in the weirdest way I could think of: on top of a WPF RichTextBox. Yep, that’s right. I’ve made myself a ConsoleTextBox which subclasses the RichTextBox and handles keyboard input etc to behave … roughly … the way a Console should.

It’s far from finished, but it is working, so this is by way of announcing the first public alpha release of PoshConsole! The vast majority of PowerShell scripts will run without a hitch — the only time you’ll have problems is with secure string input (eg: passwords), with direct raw buffer interaction, and with running “legacy” console applications — it does not yet redirect standard input/output/error.

One small tip: if you have the PowerShell Community Extensions installed, you’ll want to remove the alias they set up to pipe help through “less” ... because less is a legacy console app — you won’t get any help at all.

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