FAQ

Is this Microsoft’s ISE?

No. DetentShell is an independent product of Detent Point LLC. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or built with Microsoft. Microsoft’s official ISE documentation states the ISE is “no longer in active feature development” and that “there is no support for the ISE in PowerShell v6 and beyond” (Microsoft Learn: Introducing the Windows PowerShell ISE). That gap is why DetentShell exists. “PowerShell” appears in our copy only to describe what the IDE is for.

How DetentShell compares →

Is DetentShell free?

DetentShell launches at $29.99 in the Microsoft Store for its first two weeks. The regular price that follows is not final yet and will be published here first; volume licensing for teams is handled separately. Prices will be published on this site when they are set.

One piece of the app is free: PesterForge Editor Edition, the built-in test generation. It’s the free slice of the full PesterForge product, separate from the IDE’s paid tiers.

Does the AI phone home?

No. Today, there's no control anywhere in the app that could turn it on. Test generation runs through PesterForge Editor Edition, a local child process on your machine, and every generate call explicitly re-asserts AI off and auto-escalation off on the outgoing request, even though the local server already defaults that way. The app's automated tests enforce exactly that.

The underlying PesterForge engine can technically accept an AI-enrichment request from a caller that makes one directly (the mechanics are on the Pester test generation page), but DetentShell’s own code never asks for it, and there’s no setting, checkbox, or menu item anywhere in the app that would let you ask for it either. That capability belongs to a different surface, not this app, not today.

Does DetentShell send telemetry?

No. As of this writing (July 2026) there is no telemetry, crash reporting, analytics, or update-check code in DetentShell. We checked the source before writing this answer, and there is no HTTP client anywhere in the app.

It touches the network only when you tell it to: scripts you run doing whatever they do, a remote session you open over WinRM, or an AI provider you explicitly opt into. If that ever changes, this answer gets updated before the change ships.

Can it run my Windows PowerShell 5.1 scripts?

Yes, with a caveat. The analyzer classifies each script: anything that genuinely cannot run on PowerShell 7 (the workflow keyword, .NET-Framework-only constructs) is routed to a separate Windows PowerShell 5.1 process, using the 5.1 already on Windows. You can also force a tab to 5.1 yourself.

The caveat: the 5.1 path is batch-only. The whole script runs in a child process and the results come back at the end as serialized objects, so you don’t get the live, line-by-line experience of a PowerShell 7 tab, and 5.1 output items do not carry line numbers. The analyzer warns in both directions: 5.1-only cmdlets (WMI, snap-ins) are flagged, and PowerShell-7-only syntax that would break on 5.1 is flagged too. A machine without 5.1 gets a clear failure message, not a crash.

Where does my data live?

On your machine. Settings, the recent-files list, and logs are plain local files under %LOCALAPPDATA% in the app’s own folder: settings as JSON, logs rolled daily and kept for 14 days. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Does it run on macOS or Linux?

No. DetentShell is a Windows desktop (WPF) application, and current builds are 64-bit x64 Windows only (see the requirements above). There is no macOS or Linux version.

What are the license terms?

Not written yet. DetentShell has not shipped, and the license agreement is not published. It will be posted on this site before any paid license is sold, so you can read it before money changes hands.