He may be blocking his events, but the Microsoft exit door continued to beat with the release of sweetheart admin PowerShell 7.
We first looked at the PowerShell 7 preview almost a year ago and found little to complain about. Frankly, the same can be applied to today’s version – with compatibility improvements, new handy operators and parallelization, the open-source tool is a viable replacement for the venerable old Windows-only PowerShell.
Administrators seem to like it too, and it is currently number 38 in the TIOBE Progamming Community index (an indicator of the popularity of programming languages).
About three years ago, a strategy swerved, with the cross-platform PowerShell Core 6 (based on .NET Core) which brought Microsoft’s scripting tool to macOS and Linux. An open source license (MIT) version soon had beavers eager to contribute code, testing and documentation.
PowerShell 7 abandoned the nickname “core” and went from .NET Core 2.x to 3.1, the most recent and important version and, above all, the most backward compatible of the open source framework. This decision means that PowerShell 7 is much more backward compatible than its predecessor.
What about that special script that still refuses to run? Joey Aiello, project manager for PowerShell, said The register: “We introduced a compatibility layer in PS 7 which implicitly uses Windows PowerShell under the hood for known incompatible modules.”
The list of platforms is impressive. In addition to Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 (on x64), almost all versions of Windows Server are supported as well as macOS and many traditional Linux distributions (including RHEL, Ubuntu and Debian). The Arm32 and Arm64 versions of Debian and Ubuntu are also consulted.
The gang leaves the old Windows PowerShell alone for the time being, the legacy incarnation receiving only “high-impact security and maintenance fixes,” according to Aiello. He went on to say, “We could possibly decide to make Windows PowerShell a removable feature for users who prefer to have only one PowerShell (the last available) on their machines.”
From Microsoft’s point of view, PowerShell 7 should be “the only, real PowerShell in the future”. Just like the .NET Core gang did when approaching .NET 5.
It is because of the coupling of the PowerShell wagon to .NET Core that the long-term service versions (LTS) will correspond to those of the framework. .NET Core 3.1 is a designated LTS version and therefore has three years of support since its inception in December 2019. Support for PowerShell 7 also ends in December 2022, which could raise the eyebrows of companies that do not don’t like change.
The latest version of Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) in Windows 10, for example, will continue to fail over until 2029.
Aiello told us that the team had “not yet had any major requests from customers to expand beyond the current three years” and that it was “ultimately linked to the team’s LTS considerations .NET Core “.
The increase in the rate of updates was recent at Microsoft. The Azure Kubernetes service, for example, will only support three minor versions of Kubernetes – the current minor version and the two previous minor versions.
Going forward, the PowerShell team intends to move to an annual output rate that is better aligned with the .NET Core. The overviews should drop approximately once a month. ®
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