If you are writing any scripts for PowerShell I'd recommend looking at PowerGUI Script Editor. It's a free comunity project that has some really nice features you now expect when writting code such as intelli-sense, syntax highlighting and the ability to debug your script.

The overall aim of the project is to create a GUI for Windows PowerShell where you can manipulate objects in PowerShell by pointing and clicking. For example there is bundled functionality to list all process running on the current system invoke actions on these processes such as stopping the process. Personally I just use the script editor to edit my scripts and as I have customized my PowerShell as described in a previous post, it easy for me to then execute these scripts as I need.

Like alot of people my maths was stronger than my english at High School, probably one of the reason I was attracted to computer programming in the first place. Even today one of my weaker points would be spelling. If you're like me fear not help is at hand from ComponentOne with IntelliSpell.

IntelliSpell is an addon for Visual Studio 2008 or 2005 that will spell check your comments, strings, HTML, XML resources and general text. There is a free community edition and a Professional edition at $79.99 which offers a few more features. You get a comparison of the two editions along with download and purchase links at: http://www.componentone.com/SuperProducts/IntelliSpell/

Once you have installed IntelliSpell the spellchecker is avaliable from Visual Studio's tools menu as shown in the screenshot. With the Professional edition you get the ability to spell check an entier solution at once along with 'as-you-type spell-checking', but with the community edtion you spell check one file at time, still better than we had before. Any spelling mistakes will be shown in the task list.






The task list showing the spelling mistakes in the current document:





The IntelliSpell window that allows you to move from spelling mistake to spelling mistake and correct them as you go.

Most of you probably have heard of, or even used Camtasia, it's a wonderful product with many nice features. I really liked how the camera would automatically zoom in and out as I entered text in a web form. However no matter how nice Camtasia Studio is, it's well out of my price range for all the uasge I would make of it. However I've just found an alternative in the form on CamStudio.

It's a open source implementation of a screen recorder that includes some nice features such as defining an area of the screen which the camera should stay focused on. Most importantly to me is the ability to convert the AVI captured video to a SWF that can then be embedded in a web page. This is the tool I used for my previous post on Windows Mobile Internet Connection sharing.

Developer, Developer, Developer (DDD) are free community events held across the and Ireland which highlight some interesting technologies in the field of .NET. Last year the event as in Galway this year it will be in Belfast on Saturday 4^th April.

Having attended last years event I can recommend this as very worth while. You can get more details at the confrences web site. The event will be held at the Belfast Metropolitan College on Brunswick Street Building, Belfast.

Windows PowerShell is Microsoft's latest command line and scripting language. It's a major move forward from the days on MS-DOS Batch files and gives Windows a scripting environment more in keeping with the likes of the Bash Shell on Linux. Needless to say I like PowerShell and there are enough people out there already singing it's prasies what I want to highlight is the ability to customize the PowerShell environment for yourself.

Those of you comming from Unix or Linux will possibly have at one point encountered the '.bash_profile'. This was a hidden file in the root of your home directory and allowed you to customize various settings suchas adding environment variables. This was extremely useful and I can recall adding various JAR files to a classpath environment variable in a previous life. So when I came over to PowerShell and started writting my own scripts I wanted to may life easy for myself. Typing C:\users\alan\code\scripts is just too much like hard word even with tab complition. Wouldn't it be nice to just type 'cd $MyScripts'? Well it is and with tab completion of environment variables all I need to type is 'cd $mys' the tab key takes care of the rest.

PowerSehll has a hierarchl structure for profiles which allows profiles to be specified once for all users or for an individual user. It's simply a matter of knowing where on the hard drive to store the 'ps1' script. Your options are as follows:

• %windir%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\profile.ps1
• %windir%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\ Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1
• %UserProfile%\My Documents\WindowsPowerShell\profile.ps1
• %UserProfile%\My Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

Those profiles stored under the %windir% will effect all users whereas profiles stored under the %UserProfile% will effect only that user.

Ok so now we can look at a bit of PowerShell script to create the profile and begin customizing it.

test-path $profile
new-item -path $profile -itemtype file -force
notepad $profile

Note if you wanted to create a profile for all users replace the '-path' argument on the new-item cmdlet call with one of the paths listed above.

Now that you have a profile you can start customizing it, one of the most common things I've stored in my profile in the past has been environment variables. To do this with PowerShell simply use the Set-Variable cmdlet as shown below where I create a new variable called 'MyScripts' which will point to 'C:\Users\Alan\Code\PowerShell\MyScripts'

Set-Variable -Name MyScripts -Value "C:\Users\Alan\Code\PowerShell\MyScripts"