PowerShell Community Call - November 19, 2020
- PowerShell 7.1 GA
- PowerShell 7.2 preview
- update on updateable help pipeline
- SecretManagement and SecretStore previews
- PowerShellGallery update
- VSCode extension stability
- Working Groups
- TBD
- PowerShell 7.1 GA went out last week
- community-oriented release focused on smaller feature enhancements and bug fixes
- first GA release of PowerShell available on the Microsoft Store
- side-by-side with the preview version
- Thank you to our contributors and testers!
- PowerShell 7.2 preview went out yesterday!
- includes a lot of the contributions that couldn't go into 7.1 because of RCs
- will be working on features for the first half of 2020,
working to refine and make decisions on whether to ship these features in the
second half of 2021
- our goal is to have a preview drop available very quickly after GA so that
folks using previews don't get left behind on an old pre-GA RC
- will be on .NET 5 until .NET 6 previews start in 2021
- plan to have a blog post in early 2021 to detail planned features and
initiatives for PowerShell 7.2
- TBD whether the a preview 2 will ship in December of 2020
- plan to move from
master to main, but we're currently waiting on tooling
to help make that transition as painless as possible
- updateable help pipeline
- many of the cmdlet reference and about_* topics in documentation have been
kept up to date on the web, but updates are not being pulled down via
Update-Help
Update-Help now works for 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2- working with individual teams like SCCM, Windows, and Office to onboard them
to a new
Update-Help pipeline so that more cmdlet reference updates make
it down to your machine's console
Update-Help -Force is required because of quirks today in our versioning
- one outstanding issue case sensitivity with
PSReadLine
- SecretManagement and SecretStore
- released preview 6 and preview 4, respectively, this week
- focus on improving compatibility with Windows PowerShell 5.1
- also included UX improvements, especially around vault registration
- we love seeing folks on Twitter and GitHub teaming up to build extension vaults
- when is the Azure KeyVault extension being updated?
- no exact ETA, but we just spoke with them this week, and it should be relatively soon
- when will SecretManagement and SecretStore release as GA/supported?
- hopefully soon, we're still working through some compliance tasks
- PowerShellGallery updates
- significant outage on Oct 29-30
- root cause back to many of the stats issues we've been seeing for the previous few weeks
- as we made updates to stats issues, Gallery CPU usage spiked and made it unavailable
- we learned a ton overall from the outage
- silver lining: a ton of users and services depend on the PowerShell Gallery,
and we'll be investing significantly in the stability and reliability of the Gallery
- VS Code extension stability
- the difficulty comes with the fact that we're forced to use one session
(more specifically, one thread), and only got worse with the introduction of PSReadLine
in the Integrated Console
- stability issues weren't clearly reproducible, were often very specific to particular environments
- we've now identified a primary problem, and Rob has been working on re-implementing the way
that PowerShell manages itself within the extension
- this means that everything around remoting, debugging, and more has to be 'rewired'
- the fix is essentially all-or-nothing, which is why you haven't seen incremental improvements
as this has been re-implemented over the last few months
- goal is to get out a preview by the end of the year
upon which you'll see a significant improvement
- not promising perfection, but it will be much easier to continue improving over time
- virtually all the work is actually in PowerShell Editor Services (PSES),
which mean that any other extensions or tools using PSES will benefit from the fix
- still good to file issues in
PowerShell/vscode-powershell so that customers and users
have visibility into shared problems
- Working Groups
WG-* labels have shown up, and many were renamed straight from the Area-* labels- Working Group members will be expected to participate some minimum bar of issues and pull requests
- probably totaling ~1-2+ hours per week
- apologies for the delay, expect a blog post soon, as well as updates to
docs/maintainers and
docs/community in the PowerShell/PowerShell repo
- PowerShellGet 3.0
- Some of the Gallery issues have delayed progress on PowerShellGet 3.0
- hoping to get another preview out this calendar year
- GA release will be quality-driven rather than date-driven
- goal is to get PowerShellGet into a 7.2 preview ASAP
- requirement for braces around variable for null-conditional operator
- Committee decision not to make any changes today, but we can continue to talk about it
- Still really dependent on the extent to which folks are using
? in variable names
- Implementing cleanup/dispose block
- We really would like to get this into 7.2, will be working with @vexx32 on this over the next few months
- Intended theme of 7.1 was to improve native EXE/binary shell experience,
but we kicked the can on many of these issues to 7.2
- criteria for breaking changes
- doc published here
for categorization of breaking changes
- we tend to think along the axes of the severity of the break, prevalence of the break,
and the ease of fixing the break once you've been broken
- benefits of the break
- e.g. it's difficult to paper over syntax errors because you're required to have separate scripts
with a script that switches based on which version you're using
- this is why new operators e.g. are difficult to implement in a mixed version ecosystem
Update-Help in 7.x updates Windows PS modules in your PSModulePath as well
- Should still download proper help