MMSMOA Tips and Tricks

What’s this about?

The “Tips & Tricks Showcase” session seemed like a must attend event (especially as it was the only one in the time slot )

And when they said there were some awesome Surface Laptops to giveaway, I figured, may as well get up and share something.

A big thanks to the community for being some encouraging and welcoming to a first time attendee and presenter (and for the extra 10 seconds of speaking time)

Enough buttering, get to the meat!

The tip that I shared was around the PowerShell Module EditorCommandServicesSuite. Just install it from the gallery with

Install-Module EditorCommandServicesSuite -Scope CurrentUser

You’ll also need to add the following to your VSCode PowerShell Profile so it auto-loads:

Import-Module EditorServicesCommandSuite
Import-EditorCommand -Module EditorServicesCommandSuite

Once it’s installed and loaded, you can activate by either:

• Selecting PowerShell: Show Additional Commands from PowerShell Modules
• pressing Shift-Alt-S while editing a PowerShell file

This provides a number of very useful capabilities, but my current favorite is Convert Command to Splat Expression Splatting is a very handy way to make long PowerShell commands more readable, and more easily re-usable.

Unfortunately it has two drawbacks:

1. VSCode PowerShell auto-complete/intellisense doesn’t help you with parameter names/values when splatting
2. I usually forget something in the syntax/formatting.

This function from the EditorServicesCommandSuite module solves both those problems; just write out the command as one long line, and then let it convert it to a splat for you.

Didn’t you also say something about PowerShell Profiles?

Yep! I didn’t have time to go into it (didn’t want the bear to growl at me!), but fortunately it’s something I’ve previously written about: PowerShell Profile Tips and Tricks

That post is a bit old, but aside from not mentioning VSCode, it all still applies to Windows PowerShell, and almost all should apply to PowerShell Core.

I did however update the sample profile linked in it (and here as well) to be more current.

Hopefully this has been useful, and if there is more you’d like me to write about, just click the Suggest Topic link at the top of the page, and tell me about it!