Suggestion: Allow poshtools extension on Visual Studio Express Edition

[RamblingCookieMonster]

Hi!

Now that Microsoft is contributing to this extension, are there plans to allow it in the Express edition? This would be very helpful. Why?

• Visual Studio Community Edition is not an option for many IT professionals - not all projects can be open sourced, and we have a few more than 250 nodes.
• Visual Studio Shell workarounds seem iffy, licensing wise.
• Microsoft has 'white-listed' their own extensions in the past; for example, with Nuget or Python Tools (source)
• Not all PowerShell authors can afford or justify the other Visual Studio licenses. But if I start using Visual Studio Express for poshtools, it might help show management the value these might provide : )

Great stuff, would love to use this at work - Cheers!

[ASayre]

Hi @RamblingCookieMonster !

Thanks for opening this up here after the PowerShell Summit! Hope you enjoyed the presentation :)

Based on feedback from the Summit, our team has started asking around to see what we can do -- don't have more info yet, but know that we hear yas!

[bmoore-msft]

@RamblingCookieMonster can you tell me more about your first bullet? I.e. why CE isn't an option for you?

[RamblingCookieMonster]

@bmoore-msft - Absolutely, should have included a link!

Here are your licensing terms for community edition.

I often get responses back indicating that I should just use the community edition. The problem is that...

• I'm in an enterprise environment.
  • They take licensing fairly seriously : )
  • Not everything we work on can be open sourced. Provision 1.b.i is out.
  • We are not on the classroom or academia side. Provision 1.b.ii is out
  • My organization covers a bit more than 250 computers, and might even have more than 5 team members who would benefit from using poshtools. Provisions 1.b.iii and 1.b.iv are out.

You might safely say that individuals who would get the most out of poshtools will be operating at scale. So... 250 computers or users kills the final provision. The revenue clause would lock a good number out as well.

Even if you think of this in terms of $$$ - how many IT professionals will be able to convince their boss to purchase a version of Visual Studio that works with extensions? Not only that, but we might have other tools that provide more value for the cost. Poshtools looks like it would be quite fun, but you won't likely be selling VS licenses by not whitelisting it for the Express edition.

But... you might get me more interested in VS, and my boss might see cool solutions coming from VS, perhaps leading to a sale... who knows!

@AndreSayreMSFT - appreciate the quick response! The summit (and your talk) was great, MSFT folks seemed excited and engaged, always good to see. I was the guy who asked this during your talk, always have to ask because the tool looks quite handy : )

Cheers!

[bmoore-msft]

Thanks - I suspected that might be the issue but didn't want to speak for you ;)

[ASayre]

Marking this as future as we figure out if/when we're able to do this; It's complicated internally :)