PowerShell v7.3

This week PowerShell v7.3 was launched. This blog post will review new and exciting things about the new version.

Previous v7 version(s)

In March 2020, PowerShell v7 was launched, and in November of that year, v7.1 was there. One year later, in November 2021, PowerShell 7.2 was released, and you can guess it by now… In November 2022, the 7.3 release was there ๐Ÿ™‚

.Net version

The most significant difference in the v7 versions of PowerShell is the .NET version that it’s built on. 7.3 is built on the latest version of .NET, released three days ago.

VersionRelease DateNote
PowerShell 7.3Nov-2022Built on .NET 7.0
PowerShell 7.2 (LTS-current)Nov-2021Built on .NET 6.0 (LTS-current)
PowerShell 7.1Nov-2020Built on .NET 5.0
PowerShell 7.0 (LTS)Mar-2020Built on .NET Core 3.1 (LTS)

What’s new in v7.3?

You can read all the changes here, but the breaking changes and improvements are as follows:

  • In this release, Windows APIs were updated or removed for compliance, which means that PowerShell 7.3 doesn’t run on Windows 7. While Windows 7 is no longer supported, previous builds could run on Windows 7.
  • PowerShell Direct for Hyper-V is only supported on Windows 10, version 1809 and higher.
  • Test-Connection is broken due to an intentional breaking change in .NET 7. It’s tracked by #17018
  • Add clean block to script block as a peer to beginprocess, and end to allow easy resource cleanup (#15177)
  • Change default for $PSStyle.OutputRendering to Ansi
  • Make Out-String and Out-File keep string input unchanged (#17455)
  • Move the type data definition of System.Security.AccessControl.ObjectSecurity to the Microsoft.PowerShell.Security module (#16355) (Thanks @iSazonov!)
    • Before this change, a user doesn’t need to explicitly import the Microsoft.PowerShell.Security module to use the code properties defined for an instance of System.Security.AccessControl.ObjectSecurity.
    • After this change, a user needs to explicitly import Microsoft.PowerShell.Security module in order to use those code properties and code methods.

Known issues

So far, only one, according to devblogs.microsoft.com:

“We found a last-minute issue that should not affect most users that we will fix in an expected 7.3.1 release in December. Due to an issue with our framework-dependent package to be included with theย .NET SDK Docker images, the .NET 7 GA SDK image will still have PowerShell 7.3-rc.1 included. This should not have any functional impact on users, and we expect to update the image with PowerShell 7.3 GA in December.”

But there are already a few mentioned that need triage here. Check there if you have any issues (And report them if not already listed)

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