News

Microsoft Announces Release Candidate of PowerShell 7

• By Kurt Mackie
• 12/20/2019

PowerShell 7 is now available as a "release candidate" version, Microsoft announced this week.

The release-candidate term is older Microsoft OEM lingo that used to mean that the software bits were fully baked and ready for imaging on devices. Microsoft's announcement, though, offered this explanation for it:

This is a "go live" release, which means that it is officially supported in production until the release of PowerShell 7 General Availability (GA) next month. (Note: we reserve the right to move this day if any significant issues arise that require us to ship an RC2.) We hope this encourages more folks to use RC with their production workloads so that we can correct any problems before we release GA.

PowerShell 7 is expected to reach the "general availability" stage sometime in January. General availability still carries the usual meaning that it's a commercial release deemed ready for use in production environments.

Microsoft previously had explained that PowerShell 7 is aligned with the .NET Core 3.1 Framework, which was released earlier this month. It'll eventually be aligned with .NET 5, a unified version of the framework that's expected to arrive in November 2020.

"We intend to continue taking advantage of new .NET features coming in .NET 5 and beyond that we can use to make PowerShell 7 even better," said Joey Aiello, a program manager on the PowerShell team, in the announcement.

The idea behind PowerShell 7 is to include module support for PowerShell Core 6.x products, as well as most of Windows PowerShell 5.1, in a single scripting tool.

PowerShell has been built into ".NET SDK Docker containers," starting with .NET Core 3.0, Aiello noted. This integration permits "applications developers to write cross-platform build, test, and deployment scripts [using PowerShell] for their cross-platform .NET applications," he explained. Microsoft is planning to update these containers with .NET Core 3.1 technology sometime in January.

Microsoft also made life easier for developers using the .NET SDK to "install NuGet packages as full-blown applications." It's done via a new PowerShell Core .NET global tool, Aiello indicated.