Creating Help Files for PowerShell – Sapien PowerShell Help Writer

In PowerShell you can get Cmdlet/Script/Function help in a couple of ways. First, you can use Comment Based Help – just put in a few carefully scripted comments and the Get-Help engine can provide help. This is fine for Advanced Functions, but if you want anything richer, including real cmdlet help text, you need to use  MAML (Microsoft Assistance Mark-up Language. MAML is a variant of XML, and in my experience is almost impossible for normal people to write using just Notepad (or other text editor).

There have been a few GUI-based tools over the years that have purported to do this – but in my exper5inence none of them have ever worked. I suspect Microsoft has some internal tools, but these have not been released outside Microsoft. Well – Until now that is!!

In her blog article entitled Introducing PowerShell Help Writer 2015, June Blender announces a new tool, PowerShell Help Writer (PHW). PHW is a new tool, developed by Sapien. This stool does a variety of things including being a fully feature Help tool that makes it easy to write and manage complete and more complex Help topics.

June's blog post has some more detail on the product, and you can find out even more by going over to Sapiens's web site for PHW: http://www.sapien.com/software/powershell_helpwriter. Sadly, the tool is not free (it costs US$49.00). It's disappointing at one level – at that price, casual scripter's, small business, etc are unlikely to pay for the product. I continue to believe this tool, or something like it, should be produced by Microsoft and as part of PowerShell or PowerShell ISE.

Still, if you are writing enterprise cmdlets, or commercial products, then this tool is almost a given. Unless you are one of the very, very few who can write MAML!

del.icio.us Tags: PowerShell,MAML,Help,Sapien

PowerShell on my iPhone

I recently got a new iPhone 4 16GB, courtesy of American Express (a long story!) and have been slowly making the transition from my HTC Desire Android (a nice phone) to the iPhone. There are some observations I’ll leave for another day – but let’s just say that the iPhone is not perfect and the Desire/Android is worth competitor.

One neat thing I have found in my search for applications for the new phone is iPowerShell V2, built by Sapien. iPowerShell is neat reference tool for users of Microsoft’s PowerShell, for use on the iPhone or iPod Touch. It contains full descriptions of all the core PowerShell Version 2 cmdlets, their syntax, parameters and examples of proper usage. It also contains the complete set of “about item” help topics as well as provider and alias help.

I’ve not yet found a way to extend it (i.e. to add or modify the contents, but I find it useful to dip into and out of. I particularly like browsing the about_* files using iPowerShell.

Here’s a screen shot of the application:

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,iPhone,iPowerShell,Sapien

SAPIEN Does It Again – Primal Forms

Sapien has just released a new free tool: Primal Forms. This is a free GUI builder tool for PowerShell users. You can edit or store Windows Forms in a native XML format and generate PowerShell code on demand. There are some cool sample forms included.

Go to http://www.primaltools.com/freetools/ and look for PrimalForms, or go straight to the signup page at: http://www.primaltools.com/freetools/signup.asp?tool=pforms (althouth the latter does not say so, this is the page for PrimalForms. You have to register with an email – and you’ll get download instructions by return of email.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Primal Forms,Sapien,windows forms