Build PowerShell on Windows for .NET Full

This guide supplements the Windows .NET Core instructions, as building the .NET 4.5.1 (desktop) version is pretty similar.

Environment

In addition to the dependencies specified in the .NET Core instructions, we need:

Install the Visual C++ Compiler via Visual Studio 2015.

This component is required to compile the native powershell.exe host.

This is an optionally installed component, so you may need to run the Visual Studio installer again.

If you don't have any Visual Studio installed, you can use Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition.

Compiling with older versions should work, but we don't test it.

Troubleshooting note: If cmake says that it cannot determine the C and CXX compilers, you either don't have Visual Studio, or you don't have the Visual C++ Compiler component installed.

Install CMake and add it to `PATH`.

You can install it from Chocolatey or manually.

choco install cmake.portable

Build using our module

Use Start-PSBuild -FullCLR from the build.psm1 module.

Because the ConsoleHost project (not the Host project) is a library and not an application (in the sense that .NET CLI does not emit a native executable using .NET Core's corehost), it targets the framework netstandard1.6, not netcoreapp1.0, and the build output will not have a runtime identifier in the path.

Thus the output location of powershell.exe will be ./src/Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleHost/bin/Debug/net451/powershell.exe

Build manually

The build contains the following steps:

generating Visual Studio project: cmake
building powershell.exe from generated solution: msbuild powershell.sln
building managed DLLs: dotnet publish --runtime net451

What I can do with the produced binaries?

Creating a deployable package out of them is not a supported scenario.

The reason why we are building these binaries is we have components (i.e. workflows) that are not currently available in the CoreClr version. We want to make sure that CoreClr PowerShell changes don't introduce regressions in FullClr PowerShelll.

It's possible to run (for test purposes) the dev version of these binaries as follows.

Running Dev version of FullClr PowerShell

Running FullCLR version is not as simple as CoreCLR version.

If you just run ./powershell.exe, you will get a powershell process, but all the interesting DLLs (such as System.Management.Automation.dll) would be loaded from the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), not your output directory.

Use Start-DevPowerShell helper funciton, to workaround it with $env:DEVPATH

Start-DevPowerShell

This command has a reasonable default to run powershell.exe from the build output folder. If you are building an unusual configuration (i.e. not Debug), you can explicitly specify path to the bin directory

Start-DevPowerShell -binDir .\src\Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleHost\bin\Debug\net451

Or more programmatically:

Start-DevPowerShell -binDir (Split-Path -Parent (Get-PSOutput))

The default for produced powershell.exe is x64. You can control it with Start-PSBuild -FullCLR -NativeHostArch x86

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