First Steps with With PowerShell 7

In my last blog post, PowerShell 7 Is Here - Getting Started, I showed how you can install PWSH 7 and associated tools. I have had some good feedback on that post so it all seems to work (today!).

Having run the Install-PWSH7 script, which you can find at: https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/4638-install-powershell7, you should now have PowerShell 7 Preview 1 on your system.

The first thing to notice is that the executable is now pwsh.exe. Also, the home directory, aka $PSHOME is now: C:\Program Files\PowerShell\7-preview. What this provides is a mechanism to run multiple versions of PowerShell side by side. On my system, I have PowerShell 5.1, 6.2 and 7.0. If you use the MSI to install PowerShell 7, the installer updates your environment path so you can easily find PWSH.EXE.

The next thing to notice is that there are a lot fewer modules immediately available. Since PowerShell 7 is installed in a different folder, modules you may have with PowerShell 5.1 are not visible. One thing I had to do was copy over my personal modules.

The next thing I found is that some modules do not load naturally. So for example, you can not just use Import-Module to import the ServerManager module. The solution to this is to use the Windowscompatibility module you can find on the PowerShell Gallery. Amongst other things, this module uses implicit remoting to access Windows PowerShell cmdlets from PowerShell7, for those modules that are not compatible directly. 

An example of using this is the Get-EventLog cmdlet. By default, running this cmdlet results in errors. But by using the Import-WinModule Microsoft.PowerShell. Management command you can access the windows event log, like this:

For more information on this module, see https://github.com/powershell/windowscompatibility.

So far, the following modules need to be loaded using Import-WinModule:

• ServerManager
• ADDSDeployment (and even then some cmdlets do not work properly).
• DHCPServer

And finally, there are some things that are either not going to be supported or, arguably, are broken. So far, Windows.Forms, DSC and Workflows are not supported. Support for forms should come in later releases, prior to RTM.

With respect to Active Directory, I've worked out how to promote a server to be the first DC in a new forest but so far, I can not add a second DC to that initial domain. Still playing with that.

Another thing I found that is, arguably broken, is that the System.IO.DirectoryInfo object, returned from Get-ChildItem/GetItem cmdlets has changed the way it returns the parent directory. In PowerShell 5.1, the Parent property is just a relative path,, whereas in later versions this property returns the full path.  This will break some scripts.