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Once again, SAPIEN will be in attendance at Tech-Ed 2012, this year held in Orlando from June 11th - 14th. If you are going to be there, look for us at booth 1748. This year, we will be focussing on our Powershell related products: PrimalScript 2012, PowerShell Studio 2012 and iPowerShell Pro.   PrimalScript 2012 is the newest iteration of our cornerstone product sporting a redesigned UI, File Tab backstage view, redesigned print page, editor improvements, native Powershell remoting, an improved debugger with tracepoints and Remote PowerShell debugging.   PowerShell Studio 2012 replaces PrimalForms and adds a host of new…   More »

We have some cool new T-Shirts here at SAPIEN and we started sending them out to selected individuals. Check out Jason Helmick from Interface TT during a recent PowerShell class. For now you have to be pretty special to get one of  these, but if you stop by our booth at TechEd in Orlando you might just be lucky enough to get a SAPIEN Superhero T-Shirt.…   More »

SAPIEN Technologies once again sponsored the prizes for the annual Napa County Science Fair. First and foremost THANK YOU to all the kids who showed up on a Saturday and worked many hours collecting data, drawing graphs and keeping notes. A big “Thank you” goes out to my co-judges David Corrales, Wendi Hayes and Louann Talbert. A special “Thanks!” also goes out to Seana Wagner from the Napa County Office of Education for her tireless work in organizing this event and getting schools and students to participate. Pat Alexander for opening up the Napa Valley Museum for the fair Terri…   More »

The last installment went through all the other tabs on PrimalScript 2012’s new ribbon interface. Today we explore some really small new feature. But sometimes it is the small things that make a difference. Many versions ago we added a “Go to Declaration” to the editor’s context menu. Right click on any function or variable and select that and PrimalScript will take you there. So this time around we added the corresponding function going the other way: “Find all references”. This will search your current file for all occurrences and list them in the search results window. Unless your script…   More »

While investigating a bug report about ChangeVue’s installer we stumbled across a discrepancy with PowerShell’s PSModulePath environment variable. On a virgin Windows 7 machine the environment variable is set to “C:\windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules\” via a System Environment Variable.There is no default that links to the per-user module path. If you query the environment variable in CMD you get the expected result: If you do the same thing in PowerShell you get a different result: Same thing happens in the ISE or any custom PowerShell host, like PrimalScript. Now, Microsoft says here to add persistent changes to the PSModulePath variable in the profile.…   More »

Mike, one of our long time PrimalScript users, gave us this nice comment when I asked him why he keeps upgrading even though his company doesn’t pay for tools:   I've been using PrimalScript since version 2.1.  I've always enjoyed it and have appreciated its continuing advances and refinements. Two things stand out in its feature set: the ability to make stand alone .exe's from vbscript source and PrimalScript's "code awareness". The ability to create a single executable utility from VBScript source package makes distribution and deployment of my scripts a breeze. I particularly like PrimalScript's "code awareness." This includes,…   More »

When working with GUIs you may have noticed that the Form can freeze when running long scripts. Previously I discussed how to make your loops more responsive in this article, but not every long script comes in the form of a loop. If you truly want to make your forms responsive, you will need to move these slow scripts into another thread and in the PowerShell world this means using jobs. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PowerShell Jobs, they allow you to run scripts while freeing up the console to perform other tasks. In this case it…   More »

Last time we looked at the new code navigator on top of the source code views in PrimalScript 2012. Today we’ll have a look at the other tabs on the new ribbon interface. There are four additional tabs that are always available: View This is the place where you can show or hide all the secondary windows, or things you switched of by accident. Most items are pretty self-explanatory. The Debug console only applies to PowerShell, so don’t expect that to be available when  you are debugging VBScript. ‘Call Stack’, ‘Variables’ and ‘Watch’ become visible automatically when you start debugging,…   More »

New versions of PrimalScript, PowerShell Studio, PrimalSQL, PrimalXML, PrimalForms and ChangeVue are available. Registered users can download the latest service builds from MySAPIEN. Release Notes: 2012 Versions: PrimalScript 2012 v6.5.125 - VBScript debugger fails on 32 bit only machines- "Search again" renamed to "Repeat last search"- Encoding displayed for embedded VBScript file in WSF- Erroneous SaveAs dialog when closing embedded script without saving- "Toggle outline" not available or functional  on last line of region- Cursor moves to a wrong place when inserting a multi-line snippet- Change marker is moving with inserted empty lines- Opening an embedded file shows all lines…   More »

Last time we told you about some new debugger features in PrimalScript 2012. And you already know all about the new Ribbon user interface this new version sports. One thing that we were really focused about in this version was to make navigating your code easier. Since there is no “PrimalSense” toolbar anymore the method combo box that enabled you to jump between functions needed to find a new home. If you load a file into PrimalScript 2012 you will notice the two new combo boxes on top of the edit window: The right-hand combo box serves as an indicator…   More »