Earlier this week Nathan Mercer (Technology Advisor for Microsoft) gave me a brief look at the new Powershell Integrated Scripting Environment available with Windows Server 2008 R2. ISE allows you to run commands and write, test, and debug scripts in a Windows GUI. It also has multi-line editing, tab completion, syntax coloring, selective execution and context-sensitive help. The best thing about it from my perspective is that it is great for demos of R2 Active Directory Powershell cmdlets. Basically, it provides a much nicer view than the powershell command line and the selective execution allows you to pre-load all the commands you need (and save them in a Powershell data file), so that you don’t have to type them in front of a whole bunch of people!
ISE is installed as a feature. You can use server manager to install ISE, but if you want to go the Powershell route, try the following commands:
> Import-module ServerManager
> Add-WindowsFeature Powershell-ise
To use the feature and launch the GUI simply type the following at the Powershell command prompt:
> ise