I’ve mentioned before that I use a homegrown PowerShell host in my work.  I have been more than pleasantly surprised at how easy and how rewarding this is.  In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a few articles that have gotten me thinking about writing a series of blog posts about how to get started.

Before actually writing anything, it’s good to ask yourself…why in the world would I write a host when there are so many out there already (ISE and PowerGUI are notable free examples)?  This is a really important question and one that will stop most projects in their tracks.  Most people can get what they need using an existing host.  Here are some of the reasons I chose to write  a host:

• I wanted complete control over the environment, as I knew (hoped) that I would be spending a lot of time using it
• I wanted to be able to interact with the environment in ways that the existing tools didn’t allow
• I was constrained to use PowerShell 1.0 (which eliminates the ISE)

But probably the most pressing reason in reality was:

• I had a book (link) that explained the technology and I wanted to play  🙂

Unlike most (some?) administrators, I have a development background and even have Visual Studio installed on my machine, so testing the waters of writing a host wasn’t a big investment of time, and the pleasure of seeing something like this come together was well worth it.

Here are the posts that got my mind going again:

Create your own IDE in 10 minutes

How to Host PowerShell in a WPF Application

In the next post, I’ll start the project and give you something to look at.

Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see (or have experience implementing).

Mike