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PrimalPad has been updated to recognize all PowerShell V2 keywords and cmdlets for syntax coloring. Check your Help -> About and look at the version number, if it's not 1.0.13 you may want to head over to our Community Tools site and download it in your color and platform of choice.   …   More »

PrimalPad has been updated (1.0.12) to support Windows 7's taskbar thumbnails for open documents. It shows all open documents as thumbnails and switches the current document temporarily as you hover over a thumbnail. For those who wish to go with the default Windows 7 thumbnail, which only shows the currently active document, go to View -> Settings and disable Taskbar Thumbnails.…   More »

Forms and dialogs can augment PowerShell scripts or even resurface them completely to make them more friendly for people who aren't familiar with the command line. In some cases, a form can even function as a complete script in and of itself. The Get-GuiDate script, developed from a prototype written with PrimalForms, is an example of a script that is completely centered around a control (the Windows.Forms.MonthCalendar control) embedded in a Windows Form.   More »

We are sending our CEO and CTO on tour! SAPIEN Technologies will be visiting a number of user groups within the US to meet and discuss ideas, present new exciting products and to get feedback from you, our customers and users. Of course we  will also sponsor those meetings with cool prizes and whatever goodies the airlines let us take along.   So if you belong to any VBScript, PowerShell or general System/Network Administrators users group, this is your chance to reserve a spot for your group to have one of the founders of SAPIEN speak at and sponsor one…   More »

The soon to be released PrimalForms 2009 will become a part of PrimalScript 2009 Studio. Existing customers of PrimalScript 2009 Studio or Universal will receive the application with their regular service builds starting in August. The official release date for PrimalForms 2009 is August 1st with an introductory price of $89.00 available through www.scriptingoutpost.com. PrimalForms 2009 will also be available through our authorized reseller network, please look at http://www.sapien.com/purchase.asp for a complete list. With this change, the PrimalForms Community Edition will no longer be installed with PrimalScript 2009. It will however still be available as a free download from our…   More »

We have received some feedback that PrimalPad's saving its settings to a computer's registry reduces its role as portable editor. You can easily avoid that by placing a primalpad.ini file next to the PrimalPad.exe on your flash drive. PrimalPad will write and read its settings to and from that file rather than the registry. You need PrimalPad 1.0.8.0 or later for this.…   More »

The most common comment we received about PrimalPad was  about the choice of color for the skin. Many users emailed us, expressing that they would wish for a different choice than the carbon theme. Since PrimalPad is a statically linked no-install executable, there is no on the fly switching as in PrimalScript or many other SAPIEN tools. Stuck in a hotel room one night at TechEd I had plenty of time to re-link PrimalPad with all the skins we have available. So now you have a choice of Carbon, Luna, Aqua, Silver and Obsidian skins in 32 and 64 bit…   More »

Associating a file type with a specific application has always been fairly easy to do under the various incarnations of Windows. Basically, you can right-click on a file of the type you wish to use, select the Open With | Choose Program context menu option, then select the program like PrimalPad from the list or browse for the executable. Checking the "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file" permanently associates the "Open" verb with the selected file type. But what if you don't want to change the default association command? This happens frequently when the file type can…   More »

System Administrator are a busy lot and some of them literally run around all day fighting fires on computers no longer connected to anything. Others use remote access to tend to a large number of servers. Or both. Thanks to scripting, most repetitive tasks are taken care of. But sometimes you need to double check a script at some location or modify something you have, to fit the task at hand. Since you are on the road, literally or virtually, you don't have PrimalScript with you. Or you just are not supposed to install anything on that particular computer. That…   More »