PowerShell Pro Tools

PowerShell Pro Tools for Visual Studio Code has hit 100k downloads. We have about 30k active installations. Our feature set has slowly grown in the VS Code extension and so has our user base.

We hope to gain as much popularity as the PowerShell Pro Tools for Visual Studio!

PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio 2017 has hit 2 Million downloads!

After a year of development, maintaining a public and private repository has become very labor intensive. The decision was made to combine the two extensions and ship simply PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio. The pro features are included by default and can be enabled via a product key. The tight integration makes it much easier to address issues in each product.

In mid June 2017, I had been living in Switzerland with my then girlfriend (now fiance) working part time for a security company and part time on my own side hustle. I took the previously free version of PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio and added some new features I figured people would pay for. The new product shipped as a separate extension but plugged into the free version.

I sold my first couple of licenses in the first couple days and within a month or so I was bringing in a couple hundred a month. In my eyes, the product was a success.

Microsoft approached me to integrate the tool directly into Visual Studio. They employed a team of developers to help bring the tool up to a production quality and ensure it met the use cases that they wanted to achieve.

The tool shipped as part of the VS installation in Visual Studio 2015. Working with Microsoft was nice and they got a lot done. Although it was great to work with the team and take the project to the next level, It often felt like I was working for free so after the experience I found myself not focusing as much on the product as I had previously done. Many issues came from the Visual Studio user base and many thought the product was developed by Microsoft themselves.

After the demise of PowerGUI, PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio was developed to introduce PowerShell language support without another product being installed. It was much better integrated into Visual Studio.

This was an awesome experience to build something from the ground up.

The first version of PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio was actually a different project called PowerGUI VSX. It was built on another product, PowerGUI, that and hosted within Microsoft's Visual Studio. I worked for the company that built PowerGUI and they helped to push my project to greater audience than I would have been able to myself.

The project got a lot of blog and podcast coverage from Microsoft and the Microsoft PowerShell community.