Windows 10: PowerShell 7.1 Preview 1 now available

Brink · Mar 27, 2020

The PowerShell 7 release marks a huge milestone for PowerShell, the community, and the team!

Today we released the first preview for PowerShell 7.1! This release includes a number of changes that did not make it in time for the 7.0 release. It also includes .NET 5 preview 1!

The PowerShell team is not resting on our laurels and are committed to continuous improvement of PowerShell as we plan out our 7.1 release. This blog post details the areas of investment that the PowerShell team is funding. As weâve done in the past, weâll also be working with contributors interested in implementing new features as part of the 7.1 release.

Release Cycle Changes

PowerShell Core 6.0 through PowerShell 7 was on a (roughly) 6 month release cadence.

Starting with PowerShell 7.0, we shifted to align with .NETâs release and support life-cycle more closely. This means we intend to ship 7.1 within a week or two of .NET 5âs release date of winter 2020 and align with their annual release cadence going forward.

Modules and Tooling for the 7.1 Release Time Frame

Not everything here is expected to ship with PowerShell 7.1, but the work is being done along with PowerShell 7.1 development.

PowerShellGet 3.0

At the beginning of PowerShell 7 development, we announced PowerShellGet 3.0. This is a complete rewrite of PowerShellGet covering 3 big areas:

Improving the user experience

Removing dependency on PackageManagement (and Nuget provider) making the codebase simpler and easier to maintain

Moving from PowerShell script to C# making it easier to maintain a large and complex codebase

Based on community feedback, we wanted to take an opportunity to address many of the user experience shortcomings with a major release that will have breaking changes. We also want to leverage learnings from popular package managers like apt (on Linux) to adopt conventions already used and proven by a large set of users.

PowerShellGet 3.0 will ship on PowerShell Gallery initially, with tentative plans to deliver it into PowerShell 7.x side-by-side with PowerShellGet 2.0.
The first preview is expected later this month!

Secret Management Module

We are still working on completing Secret Management module, specifically adding Linux support, possibly macOS support, and continuing to address user feedback.

We received lots of good feedback from our preview 1 release which helped shape our preview 2 release. Thanks so much and it shows that getting previews out early really helps the project!

This module is shipped via PowerShell Gallery supporting Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7 and potentially included by default with PowerShell 7.1. This module enables secure storage and retrieval of secrets locally as well as using extensions to store and retrieve secrets from remote vaults (like Azure Key Vault).

We are also working with partners to have vault extensions available soon!

VSCode-PowerShell, PSEditorServices, and PSScriptAnalyzer 2.0

The PowerShell extension for Visual Studio Code and PowerShell Editor Services rely on PSScriptAnalyzer to perform real-time linting as you author or edit a PowerShell script. However, this scenario was not part of the original intent nor design of PSScriptAnalyzer and thus has become a user experience where errors and corrections lag after the user input. Major portions of PSScriptAnalyzer needs to be updated or rewritten to significantly improve throughput to make the interactive user experience more instantaneous, delightful, and productive.

PowerShell Jupyter Kernel

Jupyter notebooks are gaining popularity as a way to have executable code and text content in the same document. There have been existing Jupyter kernels available that support PowerShell, however, we wanted to invest in this space with one that would be supported by the PowerShell team and providing a complete experience.

Weâve already shipped the first preview of our PowerShell sub-kernel that is part of the DotNet Interactive Jupyter kernel.

We will coontinue to improve this experience making it a great choice for PowerShell and Jupyter users.

platyPS vNext

PlatyPS is a PowerShell module that we currently use to convert PowerShell documentation from markdown to updatable-help and is available via PowerShell Gallery. Based on feedback from content authors and partner teams, we need to invest in this tool to improve the author experience as well as improving capabilities of our documentation. This will be a rewrite to support improved Markdown parsing, rendering, and fulfilling requirements for our internal pipelines to publish updateable help.

Themes for PowerShell 7.1

Installation and Updating

A major pain point for our customers, particularly on Windows, is that installing and updating PowerShell 7 requires too many manual steps. We are exploring some options to make it easier to install as well as keep PowerShell updated. At this time, we still do not have a plan to ship PowerShell 7 in Windows due to differences in support requirements that we are still working through.

Shell Improvements

Most native commands work just fine from within PowerShell, however, there are some cases where the argument parsing is not ideal (like handling quotes properly). The intent is to enable users to cut sample command lines for any popular native tool, paste it into PowerShell, and it just works without needing PowerShell specific escaping.

In addition, for advanced users that want to mix PowerShell specific concepts with native commands, things may not work as expected. For example, PSDrives are a great way to abstract a file path across operating systems, but only PowerShell cmdlets and scripts can use them. We want to explore how to expose these things to native commands.

Interactive User Experience

To enable users to be more productive at the shell, we want to enable two new scenarios:

Enable predictions: We are investigating how the community can author different prediction engines helping the user complete a pipeline with minimal typing.

Enable dynamic help: While authoring a pipeline in the console, the user should be able to get context aware help like presenting help on parameters as they are typing or get full help content without having to abandon their current input or open a new console.

Enable use of color: We added some additional use of color in PowerShell 7.0 to provide visual cues when scanning console output. For 7.1, we are working with the .NET System.CommandLine team to have appropriate APIs to decorate strings so that PowerShell can render them both with color as well as plain text, as needed. This includes addressing accessibility concerns where certain colors, themes, and decorations may be hard to see.

These experiences will require changes in both PSReadLine and the PowerShell engine itself.

We are also exploring some experiments such as Out-ConsoleGridView to make the console an even more productive experience.

Minimal PowerShell

One of the great things about PowerShell is the plethora of APIs and cmdlets you can use. However, the cost of this is that lots of assemblies are included with PowerShell just in case a script uses them. This works fine for authoring scripts, but when deploying scripts, it would be better to have your target only install the parts of PowerShell needed for those scripts. Not only would it take less disk space, but more importantly, a minimal set of code means less patching and security attack surface.

As part of this effort, we also want to split the monolithic Utility, Management, and Security modules that ship with PowerShell into logical modules that can be innovated and published on their own cadence.

Finally, to improve performance, we also want to look at reducing dependencies on .NET assemblies that are not absolutely needed to reduce memory usage as well as improve startup time.

Closing

As you can see, there is a lot of work we are current exploring and prototyping. Not everything will make it into the 7.1 release and may show up in a future release. As we make progress and have more concrete definitions and scope of the work, we will publish RFCs to get community feedback like weâve done in the past. We will also leverage GitHub Projects to track progress and enable the community to provide feedback. Iâm personally excited about the future of PowerShell and looking forward to seeing feedback on our plans!

Steve Lee
Principal Software Engineer Manager
PowerShell Team
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Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/power...iew-1-release/

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Brink · Mar 27, 2020

PowerShell 7 Preview 6 now available

Today we shipped PowerShell 7 Preview.6! This release contains a number of new features and many bug fixes from both the community as well as the PowerShell team. See the Release Notes for all the details of what is included in this release.

This will be the last preview release as we head towards a Release Candidate in December. For the Release Candidate, there will be no more new features although small changes to cmdlets may still be accepted depending on risk of the change. Bug fixes will still be accepted but also accessed for their risk of causing a regression. Finally, we expect General Availability of PowerShell 7 in January as our first Long Term Servicing release.

New Features in Preview 6

This release has a number of new features from both the community as well as the PowerShell team. Remember that preview releases of PowerShell are installed side-by-side with stable versions so you can use both and provide us feedback on previews for bugs and also on experimental features.

You can read about new features in previous preview releases:

PowerShell 7 Preview 5

PowerShell 7 Preview 4

PowerShell 7 Preview 3

There were new features in Preview 1 and Preview 2, but I didn’t blog about them… sorry!

Skip Error Check for Web Cmdlets

Great addition by community member Vincent Damewood to allow skipping the internal HTTP response error check within the web cmdlets. This means that you can now handle the web error yourself including getting the response object as well as the HTTP response headers whereas previously you would have to get it from the resulting error object.

Null Conditional Member Property and Method Access

This is a new language feature that allows you to skip checking if a variable is $null before indexing into the variable, calling a method, or accessing a property. For properties, PowerShell will already allow accesing properties of $null, but this new syntax makes it more clear the intent in the script. Note that because PowerShell allows variable names to end with a question mark, you must use braces around the variable name

Extended Unix Filesystem Information

For users of PowerShell on Linux and macOS, they may miss some of the additional information of the filesystem provided by ls -l (long form of a directory listing). This new feature makes that information available using Get-ChildItem so you are no longer missing any useful information.

Windows PowerShell Compatibility in Preview 6

This release also improves the compatibility of PowerShell 7 with Windows PowerShell 5.1. We’ve brought back many existing cmdlets from Windows PowerShell 5.1 thanks to .NET Core 3! In addition, we have a new feature included with PowerShell 7 that encapsulates the Windows Compatibility Module (more on that below!).

Clipboard Cmdlets

Get-Clipboard and Set-Clipboard are back! Not only are they available again, but they are cross platform compatible which means you can use them on Linux (requires xclip to be installed) and macOS. Note that only text is supported at this time even on Windows.

Performance Counter Cmdlets

Get-Counter is back allowing you to get Windows performance counter information. Note that Import-Counter and Export-Counter cmdlets are not supported in PowerShell 7.

Graphical Tools Cmdlets

With .NET Core 3.0 bringing back WPF support on Windows, we’ve been able to bring back some popular graphical tools. Out-GridView gives a dynamic table view of results in a pipeline with sorting and filtering capabilities and when used with -PassThru can be used interactively within a pipeline to select objects to send back to the pipeline. Show-Command gives a graphical view of a command including parameter sets, parameters, switches, etc… Finally, Get-Help -ShowWindow works again to give a graphical view of PowerShell help content.

Update-List, Out-Printer, and Clear-RecycleBin cmdlets

Update-List allows adding/removing items from a property value that contains a collection of objects within a pipeline. This cmdlet is cross-platform compatible.

Out-Printer sends a PowerShell object to the printer. This cmdlet is only supported on Windows currently.

Clear-RecycleBin empties the recycle bin and is currently only supported on Windows.

Test-Connection Improvements

The original implementation of Test-Connection in Windows PowerShell relied on WMI which made it not cross-platform compatible.

Community member and PowerShell repo maintainer Ilya Sazonov ported the cmdlet to work against .NET Core APIs in PowerShell Core 6 making it work cross-platform. However, this also changed the user experience.

For PowerShell 7, Joel Sallow, another community member made improvements to this cmdlet and also getting back to similar experience as the original cmdlet in Windows PowerShell.

Import Windows PowerShell Modules in PS7

For PowerShell Core 6, we introduced the Windows Compatibility Module to allow importing Windows PowerShell modules that were not compatible with PowerShell Core 6 leveraging WinRM and implicit remoting.

In PowerShell 7, we have included this functionality into Import-Module directly without relying on WinRM, but does rely on Windows PowerShell 5.1 (it won’t work if Windows PowerShell 5.1 is not available).

Basically, for modules in the System32 folder, if the module manifest doesn’t indicate that module is compatible with Core then that module will be loaded in a Windows PowerShell process and using implicit remoting reflected into your PowerShell 7 session.

More details of this feature along with other information regarding Windows PowerShell compatibility in general coming in a separate blog post.

Closing

These are the last of the big changes coming in PowerShell 7 as we heads toward a Release Candidate next month. Please try out this preview and report issues in our GitHub repo as we still have opportunity to fix existing bugs as well as new bugs introduced by these features.

Thanks!
Steve Lee
PowerShell Team
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Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/power...l-7-preview-6/

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Brink · Mar 27, 2020

PowerShell 7 Preview 5 now available

Today we shipped PowerShell 7 Preview5! This release contains a number of new features and many bug fixes from both the community as well as the PowerShell team. See the Release Notes for all the details of what is included in this release.

We are still on track to have one more preview release next month in November. Then, barring any quality concerns, a Release Candidate in December aligned with the .NET Core 3.1 final release. Finally, we expect General Availability of PowerShell 7 in January as our first Long Term Servicing release.

Between the Release Candidate and General Availability, we will only accept critical bug fixes and no new features will be included. For that release, some Experimental Features will be considered design stable and no longer be Experimental. This means that any future design changes for those features will be considered a breaking change.

New Features in Preview 5

This release has a number of new features from both the community as well as the PowerShell team. Remember that preview releases of PowerShell are installed side-by-side with stable versions so you can use both and provide us feedback on previews for bugs and also on experimental features.
You can read about new features in previous preview releases:

PowerShell 7 Preview 4

PowerShell 7 Preview 3

There were new features in Preview 1 and Preview 2, but I didn’t blog about them… sorry!

Chain operators

The new Pipeline Chain Operators allow conditional execution of commands depending on whether the previous command succeeded for failed. This works with both native commands as well as PowerShell cmdlets or functions. Prior to this feature, you could already do this by use of if statements along with checking if $? indicated that the last statement succeeded or failed. This new operator makes this simpler and consistent with other shells.

Null conditional operators for coalescing and assignment

Often in your scripts, you may need to check if a variable is $null or if a property is $null before using it. The new Null conditional operators makes this simpler.

The new ?? null coalescing operator removes the need for if and else statements if you want to get the value of a statement if it’s not $null or return something else if it is $null. Note that this doesn’t replace the check for a boolean value of true or false, it’s only checking if it’s $null.

The new ??= null conditional assignment operator makes it easy to assign a variable a value only if it’s not $null.

New PowerShell version notification

Our telemetry available in our PowerBI Dashboard indicates some set of users are still using older versions (sometimes older previews of released stable versions!). This new feature will inform you on startup if a new preview version is available (if you are using a preview version) or if a new stable version is available to keep you up-to-date on the latest servicing release which may contain security fixes. Because this is new, you won’t see this in action until Preview 6 comes out.

More details of this feature including how to disable it in the Notification on Version Update RFC

Tab completion for variable assignment

This new feature will allow you to use tab completion on variable assignment and get allowed values for enums or variables with type constraints like [ValidateSet()]. This makes it easy to change $ErrorActionPreference or the new $ErrorView (detailed below) to valid values without having to type them out.

Format-Hex improved formatting

This improvement comes from Joel Sallow making Format-Hex more useful when viewing different types of objects in a pipeline as well as supporting viewing more types of objects.

Get-HotFix is back

The Get-HotFix cmdlet only works on Windows and will query the system on what patches have been installed. This was previously unavailable in PowerShell Core 6 because it depended on System.Management namespace which wasn’t available on .NET Core 2.x which PowerShell Core 6.x is built on. However, .NET Core 3.0 which PowerShell 7 is built on brought back this namespace (for Windows only) so we re-enabled this cmdlet.

There is a delay getting results in this example due to the number of patches I have on my Windows 7 VM.

Select-String adds emphasis

This was a HackIllinois project by Derek Xia that uses inverse colored text to highlight the text in a string that matches the selection criteria. There is an optional -NoEmphasis switch to suppress the emphasis.

ConciseView for errors

Some user feedback we’ve consistently received is about the amount of red text you get when you encounter an error in PowerShell.

The $ErrorView preference variable allows you to change the formatting of errors. Previously, it supported NormalView (the default) as well as a more terse CategoryView. This feature adds a ConciseView where most commands return just the relevant error message. In cases where there is additional contextual information in a script file or the location in a script block, you get the line number, the line of text in question, and a pointer to where the error occurred.

This new view is part of the Update Error View RFC so please provide feedback there!

Get-Error cmdlet

While ConciseView gives you more precise, but limited information on errors, we added a new cmdlet Get-Error to get much richer information on errors.

By default, just running Get-Error shows a formatted view of the most recent error including showing specific nested types like Exceptions and ErrorRecords making it easier to diagnose what went wrong.

This new cmdlet is part of the Update Error View RFC so please provide feedback there!

Closing

We have one more preview planned for November with a few more features coming from the PowerShell team as well as the PowerShell community!

Steve Lee
PowerShell Team
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Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/power...l-7-preview-5/

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Brink · Mar 27, 2020

New Powershell Core v7.0.0-rc.1 released

PowerShell version 7 RC1 has just been released.

v7.0.0-rc.1 - 12/16/2019

Breaking Changes

Make update notification support LTS and default channels (#11132)

Engine Updates and Fixes

Improvements in breakpoint APIs for remote scenarios (#11312)

Fix PowerShell class definition leaking into another Runspace (#11273)

Fix a regression in formatting caused by the FirstOrDefault primitive added in 7.0.0-Preview1 (#11258)

Additional Microsoft Modules to track in PS7 Telemetry (#10751)

Make approved features non-experimental (#11303)

Update ConciseView to use TargetObject if applicable (#11075)

Fix NullReferenceException in CompletionCompleters public methods (#11274)

Fix apartment thread state check on non-Windows platforms (#11301)

Update setting PSModulePath to concatenate the process and machine environment variables (#11276)

Bump .NET Core to 3.1.0 (#11260)

Fix detection of $PSHOME in front of $envATH (#11141)

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Release v7.0.0-rc.1 Release of PowerShell Core . PowerShell/PowerShell . GitHub

Windows 10: PowerShell 7.1 Preview 1 now available

PowerShell 7.1 Preview 1 now available

PowerShell 7.1 Preview 1 now available

PowerShell 7.1 Preview 1 now available

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