Hacking PowerGUI

Let’s talk about a few community efforts taking PowerGUI extensibility to the next level.

As a background, PowerGUI Admin Console was designed with extensibility in mind and has a notion of PowerPacks. Basically, the console is simply displaying and executing the PowerShell code supplied in the PowerPack add-ons you load. Kirk has created a great PowerPack step-by-step tutorial/reference, and shot a ten-minute screencast on that topic.

However, sometimes the native PowerPack management functionality we provide is not sufficient or we are not documenting what you can do fast enough. If you feel like that, I would highly recommend that you:

• Join the PowerShell PowerGUI PowerPack Module open source project which Russell Slater started on codeplex. This module provides programmatic access to PowerPack elements and a few useful functions you might want to use when working on your PowerPacks.
• Check out Russel’s PowerGUIObjects PowerPack which in turn uses Kirk’s AdminConsole module.

If you want to get the most out of your custom PowerGUI admin consoles – these efforts are well worth checking out and actually joining! PowerGUI is so successful because it is a community effort and you could help take it to the next level! 😉