News

Microsoft Releases PowerShell 7 Preview 4

• By Kurt Mackie
• 09/20/2019

Microsoft announced on Thursday that it has updated its PowerShell 7 preview to version 4. The announcement also described some of Microsoft's release plans for the new scripting solution.

The "general availability" commercial release of PowerShell 7 is expected to occur sometime in "January 2020," Microsoft indicated. A release candidate version will appear before that date, perhaps in "December 2019."

This coming PowerShell 7 release will be a so-called "long-term servicing" release, but it'll follow Microsoft's Modern Lifecycle Support policy. What that likely means (based on Microsoft's description for PowerShell 6.x) is that PowerShell 7 users will need to update the product within six months when minor upgrades get released by Microsoft, and they'll need to apply the latest patches within 30 days, too. Future updates stop arriving if the upgrading and patching doesn't keep pace with those cycles.

Microsoft also indicated that it plans to eventually release PowerShell 7 through the Windows Store. It'll get published via an MSIX package, Microsoft's newest software packaging approach. PowerShell 7 preview 4 currently supports the MSIX format.

New features in PowerShell 7 preview 4 include a ternary conditional operator for Boolean expressions and a Start-Job cmdlet, which can be used to "specify the working directory of the new job process before your script block runs."

Microsoft also added some Desired State Configuration (DSC) improvements and released a new DSC Resource Kit, which includes 15 DSC PowerShell modules. Organizations typically might use DSC to declare optimal configuration states for their servers, as accessed via the push or pull method.

PowerShell 7 is getting built on .NET Core 3.0. It's conceived as being a replacement for both Windows PowerShell 5.1 and the various PowerShell 6.x scripting solution products.