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 nearly identical.

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 PowerShellGitHubDev.psm1 module. The bits will be published to binFull.

While building is easy, running FullCLR version is not as simple as CoreCLR version.

If you just run ~~.\binFull\powershell.exe~~, you will get a powershell process, but all the interesting DLLs (i.e. System.Management.Automation.dll) would be loaded from the GAC, not your binFull build directory.

@lzybkr wrote a module to deal with it and run side-by-side.

Start-DevPSGithub -binDir $pwd\binFull

The default for powershell.exe that we build is x86. See issue #683.

There is a separate execution policy registry key for x86, and it's likely that you didn't ~~bypass~~ enable it. From powershell.exe (x86) run:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass

Build manually

The build logic is relatively simple and contains the following steps:

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

Please don't hesitate to experiment.

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