February 29, 2016 / by David Corrales / PowerShell Studio, Service Build, Software News, What's new, Windows PowerShell / 34 Comments

PowerShell Studio 2016 Released! – What’s New? (Part 1)

PowerShell Studio 2016 is released as part of the regular update cycle for our subscribers. We will cover all the new features in a series of “What’s New” articles. In this blog, Part 1, we introduce new UI features, including our new dark themes.

But, there’s more:

  • in Part 2, we introduce our new debugging features, including variable and function breakpoints and improvements to the Variables pane.
  • In Part 3, we look at some of the new editor features of PowerShell Studio 2016.
  • In Part 4, we show the new customizable PrimalSense in PowerShell Studio 2016.

Now let’s take a look at visual changes made to the application.

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Updated UI

We made some major UI changes by modernizing the controls, improving the theme support throughout the application and updating all the ribbon icons:

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Join the Dark Side or the Light Side?

For those of you who enjoy dark backgrounds, we improved support for the dark theme throughout the application. In fact, the dark theme is the new default for the application.

When switching to and from the “Visual Studio 2013 Dark” theme, PowerShell Studio will automatically update the editor’s syntax coloring to match the theme.

Editor Dark Theme:

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Editor Light Theme:

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You can choose your preferred theme by using the ribbon’s theme menu:

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Note: When updating from PowerShell Studio 2015, 2016 will retain your current theme and coloring preferences.

 

New Source Control Ribbon Tab

We moved all our source control features into a dedicated tab for your convenience.

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You can now access Restore point, Version Recall and Source Control commands in this unified tab.

 

Theme Triggered Editor Coloring

For those of you who wish to use your own editor coloring scheme when switching between themes, we have you covered. All you have to do is create an editor preset and name it the same name as the theme you wish to be the trigger.

For example, you can override the “Visual Studio 2013 Dark” coloring by creating an editor preset with the name “Visual Studio 2013 Dark”:

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  1. Go to Options->Editor->Font and Color
  2. Configure your color settings
  3. Press the “Save As Preset” button.
  4. Save the preset using the desired theme name.

 

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Now PowerShell Studio 2016 will automatically load your editor preset when the matching theme is selected.

Updated Panels

We updated the PowerShell Studio panels and in most cases added search / filtering functionality. For example, the Functions Panel now has a search field in addition to modernized look:

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Now you can filter the functions in the Functions Panel by simply typing in the search field:

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Tools Panel:

We made several changes to the Tools Panel. As mentioned above, we added filtering capabilities to each tab:

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We moved the list of used controls to its own tab:

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You can use the selection list to select controls in the designer. Use the search field to quickly location the desired control in your GUI.

 

Help Panel:

The Help panel now supports the Dark theme:

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Additional Search Capabilities

We also add search / filtering capabilities to various dialogs throughout the application.

Form Templates Dialog

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Add Events Dialog

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Select Property Sets Dialog

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Stay tuned for Part 2 of “PowerShell Studio 2016: What’s New?” blog series.

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