One concept that stymies many PowerShell beginners is the PowerShell Host. There is a relationship between the PowerShell engine and the host. PowerShell itself is a set of DLLs and .NET code. It cannot exist in a vacuum. It requires a hosting application. PowerShell.exe and pwsh.exe are more than a collection of cmdlets. These are compiled command-line programs that host the PowerShell engine. The PowerShell ISE is another application that hosts PowerShell. The same is true of Visual Studio Code. If you have the appropriate developer skills, you too could create a PowerShell application.

You can view the host by looking at the $host variable or running Get-Host. Here are a few examples.