Thanks to the new Extension Manager inside Visual Studio and the improved extensibility model, a long list of extensions is finding it’s way to the Visual Studio IDE. One of this extensions is PowerConsole written by Jianchun Xu. It’s a PowerShell console window that lives inside of the Visual Studio. Rather than just being a dumb shell, it actually ties into the Visual Studio DTE [explain]. This allows you to access parts of Visual Studio itself like your solution, project, files and even code.
With PowerConsole you have access to some of the Visual Studio parts. There’s a built-in variable created for you when PowerConsole loads; $dte. $dte gives you access to parts of the system, including your own solutions and files. Type “$dte” in the PowerConsole and press enter.