Aaron Lerch

A while ago I "released" the Symbol Server Transaction Manager. It was a binaries-only, quick-and-dirty GUI wrapper utility I wrote on top of the symstore.exe command-line tool, at the prompting of John Robbins. If you're not familiar with Symbol Servers, symstore.exe, or John Robbins, get up to speed by reading John's still-relevant 2002 Bugslayer article in MSDN magazine, or taking his Mastering .NET Debugging class.

I got some good feedback on the utility, along with some additional feature requests that ran outside the bounds of what the symstore utility offered. That lead me to upgrade my project to include a full-fledged (well, almost) symstore replacement, plus the GUI manager utility.

I've published the project tonight on CodePlex as "PSSymbolStore", and I've released the initial 0.1 beta release.

So what did I add and what did I change?

PowerShell

PSSymbolStore is now founded on a set of PowerShell cmdlets that replace and extend symstore's functionality. (Almost: I need some feedback about a few symstore features and how they might work in the PowerShell world. If you're a symstore wizard - ahem, John - drop me a line.) The initial release includes the following cmdlets, along with full help, including examples:

• Add-Symbols - Adds symbols to the symbol store
• Get-Transaction - Retrieves some or all of the transactions from a symbol store
• Remove-Transaction - Deletes transaction(s) from a symbol store
• Lock-Transaction - Locks transaction(s), preventing them from being deleted with the Remove-Transaction cmdlet
• Unlock-Transaction - Unlocks transaction(s), allowing them to be deleted with the Remove-Transaction cmdlet

Symbol Store Manager

The Symbol Store Manager (formerly "Symbol Server Transaction Manager") is basically the same from a UI perspective, but has been massively gutted. The internal changes (MVP pattern, PowerShell hosting, etc.) are all for the better as they fully enable unit testing, which is coming in a future release. I'm looking for feedback on the UI - what I can improve, etc. It's really basic right now. I had started adding a search feature using ShuffleText's Highlight fuzzy search library, but didn't have time to finish it the way I wanted so I've pushed it out to a future release.

vNext

So what's coming next? I've already mentioned unit tests and searching. I'm also kicking around some UI enhancements. Aside from those features, and finishing up some "paperwork" like installs, I don't currently have a strong feature list. If you have ideas, please either post them as a comment here, or even better on the codeplex project site. For example: would this be more useful as an MMC snap-in instead of a standalone application?

Download PowerShell if you haven't already, and give PSSymbolStore 0.1 Beta a whirl - I hope it's useful!