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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, you'll need to:

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.

The output location of powershell.exe will be

.\src\powershell-win-full\bin\Debug\net451\win10-x64\publish\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 can you do with the produced binaries?

Important: "We don’t support production deployments of these binaries on any platform". For PowerShell .NET (aka: FullCLR PowerShell) our recommendation is to continue using the PowerShell .NET version already shipping in Windows Client and Windows Server.

The primary reason to build the PowerShell FullCLR binaries is to test backward compatibility, and interoperability between .NET and CoreCLR. It is also important to mention that some features like PowerShell Workflows are not currently available in the CoreCLR version. We want to provide the ability for the Community to test CoreCLR PowerShell code changes while validating that these changes don't introduce regressions in .NET PowerShell (aka: as FullCLR PowerShell).

To run (for test purposes) the dev version of these binaries please follow the following steps:

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 function to workaround it with $env:DEVPATH

Start-DevPowerShell -FullCLR

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 -FullCLR -binDir .\src\powershell-win-full\bin\Debug\net451\win10-x64\publish

Or more programmatically:

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

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