Is Make-Shell deprecated?

Question

A couple of years ago I used Make-shell to create custom shells with custom cmdlets. Later I used snap-in technique and I forgot about that option.

Now I should deploy a set of custom cmdlets to a big set of customers, and it would be better to provide a zero-configuration solution; hence, I remembered the custom shell solution and I'm wondering if it is still the best solution in such scenario. It would be helpful also because my cmdlets use WF 4.0, so that the shell should run under latest framework version. Anyway, I'm a bit scared about support for it: is it still working with Powershell 2.0 functionalities?

Are there alternative ways to easily deploy cmdlets on customers' machines?

Thank you

Answer 1

In PowerShell V2 the alternative are modules.

You can write script modules, binaries modules, manifest modules. Simple to deploy. They are deployed by a simple directory copy. And theoretically may be shared on the Network in a path writen in the environement variable PSModulePath.

According to this StackOverflow entry PowerShell (the engine) runs fine under .NET 4.0.

Make-shell is no longer provided with PowerShell, you can find it if you install the Windows SDK. This article present it as deprecated. But I'am not able to find the information on Microsoft site.

Answer 2

Not sure why you would use makeshell when you can create your own PowerShell "shell" called a host. Have you seen Joel Bennet's PoshConsole which uses .NET 4?

http://poshconsole.codeplex.com/

That said if you really want to use makeshell, I have more recent blog post where I built a new sqlps host with it even

http://sev17.com/2010/05/the-truth-about-sqlps-and-powershell-v2/