Microsoft recently introduced Powershell 7 as their first public preview. The new version of the Windows console was developed on the basis of .Net Core 3.0, leaving behind the somewhat older .Net Core 2.1. According to Microsoft, this brings performance improvements and new application interfaces for developers. These include WPF and Winforms APIs, which are limited to Windows applications.

Powershell 7 has the ability to offload reports and logs automatically to a remote machine. This is so far only possible with special settings that differ in operating systems. Microsoft wants to standardize this with Powershell 7. Incidentally, users should be informed faster if they use an older version of the shell. “We need a way to kindly inform users that a new version is available,” Microsoft writes in a blog post. This is probably not yet implemented in the first preview.

Still a lot to do

Users have many other desires, such as improved error formatting, null conditional assignments, or a for-each object. Microsoft acknowledges that there are too many requests to implement all directly and would like to start with the above and some other functions.

The Powershell team is working in parallel on a better integration of the tool with Azure Functions 2.0, whose open preview was announced a few weeks ago. More resources are being allocated to PSReadline 2.0 because the project is “larger than a person” . The previous version is the default for Powershell 5.

Microsoft can not say exactly when a final version of Powershell 7 will be ready. Since she is based on .Net Core 3.0, according to the developers, she will be released about a month after this. Currently .Net Core 3.0 is also in a preview phase, of which there have already been five different ones.