Using PowerShell as the Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt

Overview

The Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt is a command window that loads up a bunch of useful environmental enhancements when it starts.  This let's you access things like sn.exe from your command window.  However, it loads up in cmd.exe and I prefer using PowerShell 'cos it's proper useful!  This article shows one way making PowerShell act like the Developer Command Prompt.

Adjust your PowerShell Profile

When PowerShell loads it looks for a profile file under your user profile and loads that if found.  By default, the profile file is:

\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1

Note that you can access your documents folder path from PowerShell like so:

$([environment]::getfolderpath("mydocuments")

If that file isn't there, create it, add the following code and save it:

Adjust the environment in the last line above according to your VS installation.

Load in PowerShell

Open up a new PowerShell window (existing windows will not have loaded the profile we've just saved).  Type sn and to show that you don't have access to sn.exe:

Then type As-VSPrompt and hit .  This will load up the Developer Command Prompt profile.  Type sn and again and you see sn.exe reporting for duty:

Installing a Service using Topshelf with OctopusDeploy

I was using OctopusDeploy to install a Rebus service endpoint as a Windows Service from a console application created using Topshelf.

Octopus has built-in support for Windows Services that uses sc.exe under the hood.  I'd used this many times previously without hitch, but for some reason the install seemed to start before the service was fully removed.  As Topshelf can do all the service set up, I decided to try using that instead.

My deployment step in Octopus was configured to use the standalone PowerShell scripts.  Installing using Topshelf is simple - just call the executable using the commandline install --autostart.  Removing a Topshelf service is just as simple - call the executable using the uninstall commandline.

The only hard part is finding the executable path for the service so that you can remove the service before re-deploying.  PowerShell doesn't have built-in support for this at time of writing, but you can do that pretty easily using WMI.  The following function is based on David Martin's SO answer and finds the executable path from the service name:

From that point, it's pretty easy to remove the service using Topshelf:

An alternative approach would be to use a known installation location each time and derive the executable path using Octopus' powerful variables.

References
The code for the pre-deployment and  post-deployment tasks can be found in this gist.
The full Topshelf command line reference is here.