Better user awareness of documentation of Powershell extension install with AllSigned group policy

[ardunster]

Prerequisites

• I have written a descriptive issue title.
• I have searched all issues to ensure it has not already been reported.

Summary

Would like to request this documentation be a little more obvious somewhere, I installed the PowerShell vscode extension for the first time today hoping it would help me set up a profile script and had to follow a daisychain of multiple pages from googling the error message to find this issue and a way to activate the scripts in question to manually mark them as trusted. Even just a "click here for additional instructions if you have the AllSigned group policy" in the "Installing the Extension" page would have helped a lot. I know it is mentioned as documented, but I wouldn't even know where to find that documentation from just trying to install the VSCode extension.

Proposed Design

No response

[MN-Joe]

Based on your description above you have this working. If so please enlighten me as to how you accomplished this. I too am working get the PowerShell plugin to work in an AllSigned environment. Thanks !

[ardunster]

I'm not in a position to give copy paste commands, but what I did was to look at which filename was causing errors, then manually run it with powershell and select "always run" for the Microsoft signature. For whatever reason I actually had to do this twice (two different files), I'm not sure why the signature differed.

The documentation change in this commit might help you more directly.

[MN-Joe]

Yep - I did that but still won't run - the Microsoft Certificate expired on 12-2-2021 so maybe with the Allsigned GPO that's still preventing it from running. When I run the script I do accept always and the expired certificate shows in my trusted publisher but still VSCode refused to start powershell.

[MN-Joe]

If anyone else is running into this issue the documentation tells you to import-module c:\users\youruser\.vscode\extensions\ms-vscode.powershell-2021.12.0\modules\PowerShellEditorServices\PowerShellEditorServices.psd1

This is good but I don't know of a way for it to generate a prompt for you to load the certificate - you need to use powershell and load the following file: C:\Users\youruser.vscode\extensions\ms-vscode.powershell-2021.12.0\modules\PowerShellEditorServices\Start-EditorServices.ps1

This will generate the prompt for you to select Always to load the certificate into the Trusted Publishers.

Just be advised that as of my typing of this note they are working to get the certificates updated as they had expired.

[StevenBucher98]

We have instruction on how to install PS extenion on restricted systems here