PowerShell 7.0

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/announcing-PowerShell-7-0/

by omiossec • 6 years ago

185 128 6 years ago

devblogs.microsoft.com

Swtrz• 6 years ago

Ternary operators and better Get-Error output are very welcome additions, Ive been writing a few infrastructure testing tools in Pester that could possibly be consolidated.

22c• 6 years ago

Interestingly, I saw that PowerShell 7.0 was the default level of documentation when I was browsing Microsoft docs yesterday and figured I must've missed the announcement.

I like the pipeline parallelization feature, I wish more languages offered simple semantics like this to just parallelize some basic tasks.

josteink2• 6 years ago

I’m not a PowerShell fan by large, but you can tell a whole lot of effort went into this.

And for what ends? Seemingly to make more Microsoft technologies and APIs available on non-Windows platforms.

I genuinely like this part of the “new” Microsoft.

ASalazarMX2• 6 years ago

I feel like we're in the "extend" phase of embrace-extend-extinguish cycle.

The last step would be creating Microsoft Linux for Developers when enough market penetration has been achieved, and making sure their tooling is hard to maintain in other distributions.

jamesgeck04• 6 years ago

embrace-extend-extinguish refers to Microsoft's adoption of existing technology. It's not a great fit here; Powershell is their own thing.

unreal372• 6 years ago

Amazon has it's own Linux. Why not Microsoft?

Ididntdothis6• 6 years ago

I think today embrace, extend and extinguish applies more to cloud providers like AWS. They take a lot of open source, wrap it into their own code and then lock people in. MS is one of the perpetrators but Amazon and Google are no better.

animalnewbie9• 6 years ago

Thank God you realize this. Just yesterday I noticed that systemd uses azure pipelines for testing and somebody as wise as you told me that Microsoft is slowly adding windows Installer code to systemd and in a few years you may think you're installing linux but upon first boot systemd will actually install windows.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 6 years ago

People too young to remember the anti-trust days will deny it, but there is no good reason to trust that this isn't Microsoft's long term plan. You'd be a fool to believe Microsoft has the best interests of the open source community at heart.

Pet_Ant• 6 years ago

Well it gives a cross-platform scripting language. This can be useful for setting up projects in a dev-shop with both Macs and Windows machines.

It's also a nicer scripting language since it's table-based rather than string-based like Bash et al.

jiggawatts3• 6 years ago

This is entirely a self-interested move by Microsoft.

They want PowerShell to be the standard shell for managing Azure and Office 365.

They have Azure customers that aren't Windows users, so they have to cater for them. That's it.

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with this, it makes perfect business sense!

JeffreySnover6• 6 years ago

That's not quite right. We have always focused on CUSTOMER success.

You are right that there is self interest in that (as Satya likes to say - it is hard to be successful if your customers aren't succeeding) but the PowerShell team has NEVER been confused about what the high order bit is.

Without going down the rabbit hole, I'll just point to the fact that our launch partners for PS Core were: - AWS - GCE - VMWARE

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

kbd• 6 years ago

I'm interested now that PowerShell is cross platform. For someone reasonably fluent in bash/zsh (and Python, etc.) already, could someone give examples of where they might use PowerShell?

http://nushell.sh/ is an example of a new (non-POSIX) shell that's trying to be more structured, similar to PowerShell. Thanks to nu's new -c option, it's possible to use nu profitably even if you don't make it your shell. I doubt I'd ever use PowerShell as my system shell on Mac/Linux, but I don't want to close myself off from tools that might be useful for particular tasks or scripts.

chaostheory2• 6 years ago

The only time I'm forced to use PowerShell is when dealing with edge cases involving MS products. In our case, we needed to refresh SQL Server Cube data within an Excel file and we didn't want to use iron Python, so we relied on PowerShell for doing the refresh work while Python controlled its process.

Personally, since MS has made Javascript a 1st class citizen on Windows now, it would be nice if Javascript and Typescript were better integrated into PowerShell. It would be nice to have one language to rule them all. I hate the time wasted with context switching. Also, I still hate using PS script. They make a lot of strange style decisions like with method / parameter declaration.

tasogare• 6 years ago

Please no. They already compromise a lot on the design of UWP to support JavaScript. Also, JSX was supported for decades on Windows and I don’t think it got any adoption.

The syntax however should get a lifting, to result in something like C# but with less curly braces.

whalesalad2• 6 years ago

The ecosystem of stuff is the first thing that comes to mind. Windows has never been an environment that was well suited for modern automation practices (infrastructure as code).

For instance, it's not straightforward to take a database or XLS document of users and transform that into an Active Directory implementation.

Here is a tool that would help with that: https://github.com/dsccommunity/ActiveDirectoryDsc

Normally you would need to run this on a Windows machine ... but now I am excited at the thought of using it from my mac.

I'm in the middle of doing a rollout of new network infrastructure, VPN, Firewall appliance, Hyper-V hosts, Active Directory, O365 sync, File storage, etc... for small/medium sized business. I am primarily a software/ops consultant, so I like to build infrastructure 'as data' and then use that data to assert the real thing. IE, terraform apply.

tl;dr – with cross platform we're closer to bringing modern ops tools into Windows land which is exciting. WSL is useful when you are on a Win box, but if you are trying to build infra from Linux/macOS you are struggling.

Here is a big list of powershell crap I have starred recently on Github:

- https://github.com/dsccommunity/ActiveDirectoryDsc (linked above)

- https://github.com/rmbolger/Posh-ACME

- https://github.com/DrEmpiricism/Optimize-Offline (not relevant to cross platform)

- https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 (not relevant to cross platform)

dfxm12• 6 years ago

Automation of tasks in Microsoft products in general, but particularly Office 365.

sbierwagen• 6 years ago

Looking at it, seems like Microsoft mostly intended Powershell integration to be used for admin/IT tasks, rather than end-user task automation. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/powers... Am I off base?

olyjohn• 6 years ago

Do the Office 365, Active Directory, etc modules actually run on Linux or MacOS now? Last time I tried Powershell on my Mac, it couldn't do any of that stuff, and I felt like it was pretty useless to run on anything other than Windows.

unreal372• 6 years ago

It's huge for Azure automation. Spinning up machines, deployments, any task that you need to perform in the cloud.

exyi2• 6 years ago

I like to use PowerShell for scripts (sometimes), while I use fish as a interactive shell. I'm a SW developer familiar with .NET, and it's reasonably easy to call any .NET functions from PowerShell while it's also easy to call any external program (do pipes and all this unixy things). Mostly, my use cases are things other people would use Python rather than Bash. PowerShell is a compromise between the two, in my view.

For example when I wanted to create and keep btrfs snapshot with exponential decay on their frequency, that would be quite tedious to write in Bash (I think, at least).

I used to like that I can run the same thing on Windows and Linux, but I stopped using Windows and got used to programs that would have to installed on Windows, so it's no longer an advantage to me. But in theory, it's still IMHO easier to run PowerShell script on Linux than it's to run Bash scripts on Windows.

I have not seen the nushell, thanks for posting that! From PowerShell I'd expect more online material and more stability.

It also has quite a bit of disadvantages: * Sometimes it's called `powershell` and sometimes `pwsh`, breaking shebangs * Startup is sloow. May be issue for some scripts that run often. * Linux people sometimes look at me very strangely :D * Installation size is significant if you count .NET into that. So not a good fit for setting up docker containers :/

(btw, it works on Linux for quite some time already)

jamesgeck04• 6 years ago

Sometimes it's called `powershell` and sometimes `pwsh`

This probably isn't something kbd would run into; the command is always `pwsh` on macOS/Linux.

Windows users get `powershell` (Powershell 5) and `pwsh` (Powershell Core 6 and Powershell 7) for backwards compatibility reasons. It's another `python` vs `python3` situation.

Mountain_Skies• 6 years ago

I use PowerShell mostly for pulling data from Active Directory. Used to write little C# programs for this but PS has a nice AD module that covers most of the common tasks I need to perform.

jlgaddis2• 6 years ago

I don't use Windows at all, so my only use for PowerShell is with VMware's "PowerCLI", a set of modules for managing vSphere environments.

vips7L3• 6 years ago

I use pwsh as my main shell on both Windows and Linux. For me it's just more sane than bash with less pitfalls that I've experienced. And if there's something I can't do in pwsh, I have the full power of the .net CLR to do it for me.

unsignedint• 6 years ago

I have been using pwsh on Linux fairly regularly, too. I got plenty of script and C# modules that I have been using to automate some tasks. (Data wrangling, scraping, and merging, etc.) that I want to use both on Windows and Linux.

Since there are certain tasks that are more suitable with regular shell, I have Ctrl-Alt-P assigned to launch pwsh, and Ctrl-Alt-T assigned to zsh under Linux.

paulcarroty• 6 years ago

PowerShell is cross platform

cross-platform, yeah, but I have big doubts about real niche & competition over C# stack. Why should people use this on Linux or mac?

sebazzz• 6 years ago

Besides devops, I also do sysops for the servers of my team. Backup scripts, scripts for monitoring (plugins for NSClient++) and various utility scripts are written in Powershell.

Other scripts include synchronization of credentials from CyberArk Vault to Keepass, a start-up script which opens my common used applications and VPN (Outlook, Firefox, Visual Studio, OneNote, etc).

I also use it daily during software development if I need to manipulate or transform data I need during development.

cannam• 6 years ago

For someone reasonably fluent in bash/zsh (and Python, etc.) already, could someone give examples of where they might use PowerShell?

My experience as a regular bash user and very occasional PowerShell one has been that I can write a script much more quickly using bash, but it has a better chance of getting things right first time using PowerShell. Generally this is because of simple things like the fact that arguments are passed in proper data structures rather than as quoted strings.

So I like PowerShell, it's effective and pragmatic and I think it's potentially good for scripts you want to put in production or redistribute. There are just a few problems -

* As an occasional user I find it all a little hard to keep track of, with liberal use of aliases and abbreviations (obviously intended to simplify things, but they mean reading examples is more complicated) and a less regular syntax around things like piping

* I believe that pipelines will (sometimes? often? always?) pass an in-memory structure rather than streaming - this can make it a lot less scalable (would appreciate correction on this but I do recall running out of memory on things I wouldn't have had a problem with in a Unix shell)

* The fact that it isn't "available by default" does matter, really - after all this is one of the biggest reasons one writes a shell script in the first place, rather than using some other language

fetbaffe2• 6 years ago

Nushell looks great. This is what I have been looking for, structured data but with sane naming .

physicles2• 6 years ago

I’d only consider PowerShell when working with tech that is best managed through it, so stuff from Microsoft. It was great for the couple years I used it full time, even built a test runner that used .NET TCP classes to automate stuff through a telnet connection.

Now that I’m on Linux and doing open source stuff, I’d never consider using PS.

miohtama• 6 years ago

I am not a PowerShell user, but now consider it based on the comments here. Why would you never run it on Linux?

DevoidSimo• 6 years ago

I find it fantastic for running scripts on multiple machines. The invoke-command cmdlet makes it very easy to do this if your computers are a domain or have the same username and password. Credentials can also be supplied but that's more cumbersome.

I find many things to be easier than CMD/bash such as looping or chaining commands. I'd imagine nushell has similar benefits though.

Microsoft products such as Azure and AD are easily administered as well.

JdeBP• 6 years ago

* https://github.com/jdebp/terminal-tests/blob/master/PowerShe...

You've probably seem the widely circulated terminal colour test scripts written for Unices and Linux-based operating systems, such as 256colors.pl written in Perl and distributed with XTerm. This is a PowerShell approach. I wrote it to test what Windows Terminal could do.

It exemplifies several things.

It exemplifies the rapid prototyping nature of PowerShell. Development of this script went through several (unpublished) iterations, much of which was tested interactively. Doing that with Edit-Compile-Debug in, say, C would have taken longer.

It exemplifies that PowerShell is not limited to either TUI or GUI. The script both writes stuff to a Windows console and displays a GUI window with buttons.

It exemplifies the runtime library that one gets with PowerShell; here using Forms classes, the String class (including .NET string formatting), and of course the Console class. One gets the .NET (Core) Framework, basically, with which (on Windows) one can do things as varied as rewrite XML files, execute SQL, and (using its .NET API) enqueue builds on a TFS server.

In a very trivial way, it even exemplifies script blocks as lambdas (in the {Click} blocks being passed to the event handler registrations).

There's a whole lot more that it does not exemplify of course; including stuff like the -f and -is operators, hashes and arrays, PSCustomObjects, the object pipeline, ForEach-Object and Where-Object, nullable variables, and the extra standard streams.

And it really only tangentially, with the test at the top, illustrates how PowerShell is akin to TCL, LUA, et al., in that it can be (and is) embedded with different front-ends. In this case, the test ensures that the script isn't accidentally run in PowerShell ISE, which isn't a useful place to run the script, but more importantly which handles its console I/O really slowly to the point that it's actually difficult to interact with the UI. (I didn't employ a similar check for Visual Studio, whose embedded PowerShell has a console UI that is zero rows high.)

mekster2• 6 years ago

With all of their embracing of Linux these days, too bad MS didn't have the balls to integrate bash into Windows back then instead of coming up with something that only Windows users would be using.

discreditable• 6 years ago

Will this version of powershell ever be baked-in to Windows? My Windows 10 1909 install is currently 5.1.

jamesgeck04• 6 years ago

Powershell Core 6.0 wasn't fully backwards compatible. I imagine that full backwards compatibility would be a requirement to replace 5.1.

It looks like Powershell 7 still can't run some 5.1 scripts. Here's a compatibility table: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/whats-...

TheGoddessInari• 6 years ago

They changed the default path outout of applets like get-childitem. Microsoft employees stated that this would break many older scripts, but it wasn't listed as a breaking change.

It's unlikely to ever reach even generally acceptable levels of compatibility with the built-in version.

iamaelephant2• 6 years ago

There's no reason to bake tools like this into an OS or tie them to OS versions. Download the tools you need. If you need to "bake" them anywhere, bake them into your containers.

int_19h3• 6 years ago

The reason is to have a standard shell that is there on every OS.

Not everything is servers and containers.

WorldMaker• 6 years ago

The documentation notes that MSIX installers should be built (I didn't see any in the GitHub Releases, so maybe it is a coming soon thing), so I'm hoping that also means a possible option to install and update it from the Store. That would at least "feel" a little more baked-in to Windows than installing from a GitHub Release page.

whalesalad2• 6 years ago

I hope that Microsoft has a long-term plan for Powershell. It started as a simple shell and has evolved into an almost full-fledged programming language.

FirstLvR• 6 years ago

well, it is

is incredible useful with dynamics 365

nunez3• 6 years ago

They do. Many of their enterprise offerings (Exchange, Office 365, Active Directory) and Azure services are Powershell-first now

icegreentea2• 6 years ago

It was (almost? I never played with PS1.0) always a "almost full-fledged programming language".

It's been a CLR front-end for forever. All the way back to PS2.0 you could (if you wish) define and execute an entire WPF GUI in Powershell (see https://poshgui.com/).

jamesgeck04• 6 years ago

Homebrew is the recommended way to install on macOS, but the cask is currently still on 6.2.4.

https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/powershell

oldgradstudent• 6 years ago

3 hours later:

Current version: 7.0.0

jlgaddis2• 6 years ago

If you want to avoid the telemetry, make sure to set the appropriate environment variable (to anything) before running PowerShell for the first time!

On Linux, for example, you'll want to add something like this to your initialization / startup files:

  export POWERSHELL_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1

(Even then, I'm not sure that works for the "AppInsights" stuff!)

ta8285738• 6 years ago

Having to opt-out of telemetry in your shell is revolting. I wasn't even aware it was there. They really need better up-front warnings (or opt-in) for their OS and shell etc. Another nail in the coffin, horrible dark pattern.

Ididntdothis6• 6 years ago

I was forced to use Powershell for a project so after years of ignoring I finally learned it. It’s actually not that bad and I have even done some stuff on my Mac with Powershell core.

I just wish they made the language nicer and more consistent. There are so many weird quirks around functions, modules, scope and classes that make life pretty difficult in larger code bases. I would love to see something closer to C# (or even TypeScript) that still can use cmdlets easily. The current Powershell language to me feels like a weird hack but not something well designed. Typescript and C# have demonstrated that MS can design good languages.

This leads me to another complaint. MS is cranking out a lot of useful cmdlets that would also be useful for C# programmers but using them from C# is quite painful.

animalnewbie9• 6 years ago

I have to say some of the things that I assumed were quirks turn out to be well engineered decisions once I learnt powershell in full.

For example I started appreciating the way output in PS1 works only after using the parallel for each and was floored by how everything fell in place.

Take this from a full time Linux user, if you're not using powershell you're using an inferior shell.

One major downside for cli warriors though- it takes a couple of seconds to start. (at least 6, I don't knoe about 7).

vips7L3• 6 years ago

With modules my pwsh 6 usually starts between 700ms - 2s. Not a big deal to me though.

Ididntdothis6• 6 years ago

I would agree that Powershell has less quirks than bash which sometimes feels like one big quirk. But I think they could do much better. During my project we ran into a ton of issues around scope, return values from functions and other stuff that were really hard to deal with. You don’t see that with small scripts but our project has thousands of lines and becoming hard to manage. Now some smartass will say that Powershell is not designed for a project of that size but the cmdlets almost force you to use it for certain types of tasks. It would be pretty difficult to rewrite that code in another language.

nunez3• 6 years ago

The start time is a major disadvantage behind Powershell. It takes 3 seconds to load even if you disable profiles completely versus <1 second for Python, Ruby or Bash.

jug• 6 years ago

I was happily surprised by Alacritty that launches Powershell much faster than Powershell itself (??) on my laptop at least.

nunez3• 6 years ago

I used to spend a lot of time writing Powershell (b/w versions 3-5). Absolutely loved the language, but my love for it fell off after learning more commonly-used scripting languages like Python and Ruby.

It's the best native scripting platform you can get on Windows, but some of its primitives (functions, classes) are weird, parallelism (at least in the v5 days) was massively hacky (process-based instead of thread-based through the PSJob abstraction, though you can use native threads if you put in some work) and its syntax and overall behavior makes it feel more like a scripting language than something you'd use to build real apps (even though you can). This makes it a really tough sell to use on MacOS and Linux, even though it's based on .NET Core and you totally could.

ijidak• 6 years ago

Typescript and C# have demonstrated that MS can design good languages

I would make a slight correction, Typescript and C# have proven that Anders Hejlsberg can design good languages, not MS.

Honestly, Hejlsberg is like the Midas of programming languages.

That man is a language designing genius.

He is the main designer behind:

Delphi (which inspired VB6, Microsoft's DOMINANT language through the 90's. But it's so similar to Delphi, that you can pretty much credit Hejlsberg for it's success), C#, and Typescript

Sometimes whole companies get credit for the genius of what is really just one or two architects.

When it comes to Apple innovations, it's Jobs

And when it comes to MS language innovations, with the exception of F#, it's Hejlsberg.

b2ccb2• 6 years ago

s/Jobs/Wozniak/

laumars• 6 years ago

Visual Basic pre-dates Delphi. Remember VB6 was the 6th iteration of Visual Basic and VB hadn't really changed that much since at least Visual Basic 3 (which was the earliest version I used).

I always thought Visual Basic got unfairly mocked because it was a fantastic language and framework for non-computationally expensive workloads.

Delphi, on the other hand, I struggled to enjoy. I really wanted to love Delphi because Pascal was one of my favourite languages but Delphi just didn't gel with me and it's hard to explain why. However Hejlsburg was also the author of Turbo Pascal and that achievement alone deserves to put him in the history books in my opinion.

It's also worth noting that your Apple/Jobs comment should probably acknowledge Steve Wozniak instead.

mekster2• 6 years ago

I love what Jobs did and I like Apple way better when he was there but Jobs didn't do it all by himself, he decided. So, I think that's different from 1 genius software architect building it directly.

badrabbit2• 6 years ago

You expect powershell to be like C#,typescript or python when it is more akin to bash. It is a scripting language specifically designed for a command interpreter.

ripley12• 6 years ago

I was just trying to get a release candidate of PowerShell 7 working on macOS and Windows yesterday. It was a frustrating experience, because many essential keybindings are broken out of the box on macOS (Terminal.app, iTerm2) and Windows (using the new Windows Terminal). For example: ctrl-space is the usual shortcut to trigger menu completion, doesn't work.

It's not difficult to make custom keybindings once you figure this out, but many people's first encounter with PowerShell is going to be missing some critical UX features. Not a great situation.

https://github.com/PowerShell/PSReadLine/issues/639 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/879

eitland• 6 years ago

I used Powershell a lot last year and it is really amazing to be able to script things like Azure Information Protection and use Azure Application Insights for logging..!

(Of course, Microsoft being Microsoft one still needed to install MS Office on the server to use Azure Information Protection on a pdf or even a txt file...)

fractal618• 6 years ago

How does using powershell in Linux compare to bash? I imagine one has strengths over the other

alkonaut• 6 years ago

When you are doing things that operate on unstructured text and files you will probably get a more concise script with bash most of the time. As soon as you do anything beyond that with structured data or complex processing (e.g you fetch a Json from a web api, filter some properties in it with a regex, save the result as xml, send the xml to a program, parse the output using some complex logic,...) then the powershell is way more powerful.

You might say it’s more a tool that shines in the cases where you’d already give up on bash and use python or something else instead, because you need some libraries, some structured error handling etc.

fetbaffe2• 6 years ago

I use Powershell daily on novice level (shell only, no scripts).

There are some nice things compared to bash, like tab completion on program arguments. However it is somewhat slow.

What surprises me is that somethings are just awkward & cumbersome, like excluding multiple folders when doing Get-ChildItem.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15294836/how-can-i-exclu...

Or escaping arguments with correct quoting. Sometimes I can't get it to work, like searching for strings with weird characters, especially if I need to combine it with git grep.

JensRex2• 6 years ago

tab completion on program arguments

Bash has that as well.

This thread is full of praise for PowerShell, but every time I've tried to use it, I've become annoyed with it. For example, to get the size of a folder in Bash, I'd type `du -sh <folder>`. In PowerShell it's some absurd code spaghetti that someone put in a Github repo [1]. No matter what I try to do in PS, I find the syntax ridiculously verbose. Maybe I just don't get it, whatever it is. \shrug\

[1] https://github.com/gngrninja/PSFolderSize

flukus• 6 years ago

This is my experience too, anything non-trivial quickly becomes an absolute mess, even the trivial things often have bad defaults. A few years ago I looked into using it as a build system for .net projects but ended up tearing my hair out on even the simplest things like removing directories or recursively copying html files: http://flukus.github.io/powershell-is-a-joke.html

nickcox• 6 years ago

Not sure that's a fair comparison though. `du` isn't built in to bash, afaik; you could just as easily type `du -sh <folder>` in PowerShell.

If you /did/ need to do it without `du` then it would be something like:

`dir <folder> -Recurse | measure -Property Length -Sum`

which is easier to remember than whatever the equivalent bash would be, imo.

qf0• 6 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gJgL8a0YGA talk a Microsoft developer in the PowerShell team, did a month or two ago at a hedge fund called Jane Street.

Talking about new changes in PowerShell 7.0 etc.

zeusly• 6 years ago

Does anyone have a good resource / tutorial how to learn powershell as both a scripting language and to be powerful in daily shell life?

LilBytes• 6 years ago

I'd start here:

https://www.manning.com/books/learn-windows-powershell-in-a-...

redog• 6 years ago

docker run –it mcr.microsoft.com/powershell:preview

seemslegit6• 6 years ago

Any chance that there exists an effort to maintain mirror forks of Microsoft open-source projects with telemetry code entirely removed ?

solarkraft• 6 years ago

There is VSCodium, I'm not aware of others.

seemslegit6• 6 years ago

Thanks ! Was not aware of VSCodium

JeffreySnover6• 6 years ago

There are enough examples of companies doing terrible stuff that concerns are entirely understandable.

Let me take the opportunity to say:

1) YOU ARE NOT OUR PRODUCT! 2) Our goal is to use telemetry to help us make better decisions about what will help our customers (as with with projects, only a subset of users are active in our community feedback process) 3) We are super open about the telemetry (including going through the PowerShell community review process) and publish all the data. More details here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/new-telemetry-in-p...

Here is all the telemetry: https://aka.ms/psgithubbi

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

seemslegit6• 6 years ago

Thanks for taking the time to address this (And a great thanks for Powershell ! Which regardless of some reservations about its language is a great technology and a major leap forward in terms of soundness and productivity in the IT sphere)

I fully appreciate the importance of telemetry, crash reports etc. for product owners and teams, and am not under the impression that it is currently being abused by msft.

However, as telemetry is a very general functionality and by their nature both company policies and software products are subject to frequent changes and given the many example of abuse by some companies quite comparable to msft in terms of their scope of impact and business incentives I don't think its usefulness overrides the principal concerns regarding the practice of including it enabled by default with distributed products even when disclosed.

Anything that does not require an explicit user action to enable telemetry imo falls short of the desired ethical standard of respect for user agency that should exist in an ecosystem that wishes to foster trust between vendors and users and this goes double for open-source projects.

tony• 6 years ago

Just look at that change log: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/CHANGEL...

Meticulous. And clicking the headers link to comparisons at the tag level: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/compare/v7.0.0-prev...

And the hover link to the left of headers link perfectly to the section: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/CHANGEL...

Sections: Breaking Changes, Engine Updates and Fixes, General Cmdlet Updates and Fixes, Code Cleanup, Tools, Tests, Build and Packaging Improvements, Documentation and Help Content

That's better than what I see in node and python projects.

So much thought and caring. Let's try it:

    > brew cask install powershell
    Updating Homebrew...
    ==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
    Updated 2 taps (homebrew/cask and caskroom/cask).
    ==> Updated Casks
    caskroom/cask/microsoft-edge    homebrew/cask/microsoft-edge
    ==> Downloading ...
    powershell was successfully installed!

    ~ 23s
    > pwsh
    PowerShell 7.0.0
    Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
    
    https://aka.ms/powershell
    Type 'help' to get help.

    PS /Users/tony>

I'm using Powershell, a C# application, on MacOS, in iTerm2. I'm fine with it. Also, the subsequent bootup of pwsh was faster than the first.

Edit: You can open vim from it. Somehow, it's even detecting my tmuxp (which is in ~/.local/bin). I'm guessing it inherits PATH's from the parent shell?

SteveL-MSFT4• 6 years ago

Yes, pwsh inherits from parent. However, we've made improvements to use PS7 as a login shell. When used as a login shell, we exec sh on Linux and zsh on macOS to setup the environment, then exec pwsh to inherit.

badrabbit2• 6 years ago

Pretty exciting, someone showed me a while back how powershell 6 has a wget command. I look forward to simple things like this

But man,powershell is lightyears ahead of any *nix alternative. In particular, JEA for security and invoke-command (imagine running a block of code in parallel on multiple machines and get results locally) and other common cmdlets like import-csv where on something like bash you do have the capacity to do write a function that does these things but powershell provides these using a consistent interface,much like stdlibs do in application programming languages. After using powershell,using bash felt like trying to use C without it's stdlib. I think it's just windows' way of making up for nor having the equivalent of GNU userland tools like awk,sed and grep.

6d65• 6 years ago

I like PowerShell in general. But it's very slow. Both the startup time and the responsiveness. Especially when having something like posh-git enabled.

Having a Linux box with Alacritty and fish at home, makes it even more frustrating to start in on Windows and wait seconds to type.

And unfortunately, PS 7.0 is not a lot faster, still noticeable lag in startup.

The good part is .net integration, being able to use standard .net classes in scripts can be really helpful.

bluedino• 6 years ago

Coming from a bash background, PowerShell is consistently annoying. Here's an example, passing an XML file to a cmdlet:

    Some-Command -Param1 -FileData .\foobar.xml

Cannot process argument transformation on parameter 'FileData'. Cannot convert value ".\foo.xml" to type "System.Byte[]". Error: "Cannot convert value ".\foo.xml" to type "System.Byte". Error: "Input string was not in a correct format.""

In bash you would just do:

    somecommand < foobar.xml

Instead you have to create an object and, do a conversion:

    [Byte[]]$Data = Get-Content -Path ".\foobar.xml" -Encoding Byte -ReadCount 0

Then, run the same command using that object instead of the file:

    Some-Command -Param1 -FileData $Data

PowerShell 7.0

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