PowerShell ISE Add-on for Remote ConfigMgr Session

You may have seen the great post by Microsoft’s Matt Shadbolt on how to create an add-on for the Powershell ISE that will import the ConfigMgr module for you.  This is very useful if you are working on the Site Server itself, or have a fast remote connection to it, but in my environment, I work an a different geographical location to the Site Server.  Using the ConfigMgr module installed on my local workstation is a bit slow, so I usually use an RDP session to the server itself.

Implicit remoting, where you import a remote module, doesn’t seem to work because you need the PSDrive for the remote session.

So why not just create an ISE add-on for a remote Powershell session?  Then I can work on my local workstation, but run all the commands on the SCCM server itself with no latency penalty.

It’s easy enough to do: add the following code to your Powershell ISE profile script, located at $home\Documents\WindowsPowershell\Microsoft.PowerShellISE_profile.ps1. Add your SCCM Site Server to the $SiteServer variable.

$SiteServer = "MySCCMServer"
$CurrentTab = $psISE.CurrentPowerShellTab
  if ("$SiteServer" -notin @($psISE.PowerShellTabs.DisplayName)) {
$psISE.PowerShellTabs.Add().DisplayName = "$SiteServer"
}
$RemoteTab = $psISE.PowerShellTabs | ? DisplayName -eq $SiteServer
  while (-not $RemoteTab.CanInvoke) { Sleep 1 }
$RemoteTab.Invoke({ Enter-PSSession -ComputerName $SiteServer })
  while (-not $RemoteTab.CanInvoke) { Sleep 1 }
$RemoteTab.Invoke({ import-module ($Env:SMS_ADMIN_UI_PATH.Substring(0, $Env:SMS_ADMIN_UI_PATH.Length - 5) + '\ConfigurationManager.psd1')})
  while (-not $RemoteTab.CanInvoke) { Sleep 1 }
$RemoteTab.Invoke({ $PSD = Get-PSDrive -PSProvider CMSite })
  while (-not $RemoteTab.CanInvoke) { Sleep 1 }
$RemoteTab.Invoke({ CD "($PSD)" })
  while (-not $RemoteTab.CanInvoke) { Sleep 1 }
$RemoteTab.Invoke({ cls })

Then simply run the add-on after opening your ISE to get a remote session tab to your SCCM server with the ConfigMgr module imported 🙂