It is official — as official as it is going to get anyway — but I am in the final six-month stretch of my eight-year consecutive run of writing about PowerShell. Not that I will be done after eight years, but I have been at this awhile. What is also official is that I have written the dumbest post title yet. I am going to go with it though.
Today I had an interesting “conversation” on a post in the PowerShell Subreddit. The full link, if you are interested, is included at the bottom of this post. But really, the important parts are all included here.
The post was about someone using Write-Host that should have been using Write-Output. That was not where I took the conversation, however. Instead, it became a discussion about moving away from the ISE to Visual Studio Code. I think that this is an important move, and so I thought I would include it all here because I think I made some good points, and maybe because I am after that 416 post count by June 2022. More the first, though.
Me: “Beyond that, OP, it is time to move away from the ISE, and probably Widows PowerShell too. 2¢”
Not me, or the OP: “Nah, ISE4LYFE
Me: “[SMH] Think of your résumé: ISE vs. VS Code. Speaking of your résumé, did you do create that in Notepad and print it on a dot matrix? 😉 I loved the ISE once too, but I think it’s time…”
Not me, or the OP: “I mean, I’m not old enough to have used dot matrix (well, kinda, 30)
My main issue with VSCode vs ISE is that it’s a UI mess from as soon as you install/open. Vs ISE, it’s just notepad ontop of powershell.
ISE is just easier for me for the quick and simple stuff, where i just bust out some script for a minute or two.
Granted, running the code-server is really nice”
Me: “Oh, I get it. VS Code takes some time. It took me some to finally give up the ISE in full. And, I’m the same guy that paid attention to the PowerShell launch in 2006. One person, around that time (that I believe was associated with Microsoft), said that if you’re using VBScript, then continue to use it. That it is still going to be there, as in, in the operating system. That’s all it took for me to not pay attention to PowerShell! I bet the ISE is still going to be there too.
Cut to six years later, in 2012, and I finally let go of VBScript, which I loved, and forced myself to use PowerShell, which I now love. You’d have to pay me a large amount of money to even look at VBScript now. While I can’t say the same thing about the ISE, I’d miss VS Code an awful lot if the ISE is all I had. While it took some time and frustration and wanting to go back, I pushed on!
Speaking of, “if the ISE is all I had,” I recently wrote an AWS CloudFormation template to build out a vanilla Windows Server, server. It was beyond frustrating to build a new instance and only have the ISE. As a part of the CloudFormation, I installed PowerShell 7, installed VS Code, and installed the PowerShell VS Code extension. Again, I once loved the ISE.“
Here is the PowerShell Subreddit post.