PS Community Call for November 19, 2020

[joeyaiello]

Please add topics and questions for the November 19, 2020 Community Call here.

Agenda:

• PowerShell 7.1 GA
• PowerShell 7.2 preview
• update on updateable help pipeline
• SecretManagement and SecretStore previews
• PowerShellGallery update
• VSCode extension stability
• TBD

[kvprasoon]

Update about Working groups ? I see WG-* labels out there.

[iSazonov]

I would like to say a big thank to @xtqqczze for his great job modernizing PowerShell codebase (style, formatting, forcing analyzer rules).

[ThomasNieto]

• PowerShellGet v3
• Do not require { ... } (curly braces) around variable names for null-conditional member access PowerShell#14025
• Implement Cleanup { } Function Block PowerShell#9900

[rkeithhill]

Any plans to get overall better native exe support into 7.2 or is that an 8.0 thing?

• Call native operator PowerShell#13068
• Arguments for external executables aren't correctly escaped PowerShell#1995
• Native Command Error Handling #261
• etc

[ili101]

Will there be a day when we will be able to copy paste random code from the internet like dig @8.8.8.8 github.com to PowerShell and it will just work?
Is this in the scope of PowerShell/PowerShell#1995?
If it is will it be merged in some point? as I understated it's a braking change but it will be a beneficial as it will make PowerShell compatible with all the other terminals like cmd and bash.

EDIT: @rkeithhill you beat me to it by a few seconds (:

[ThomasNieto]

Specifically about question marks as valid characters in variable names. Last community call the PS team indicated that they would be looking back into the issue. @mklement0 request is to reopen the issue as analysis of the PowerShell corpus found that virtually no one uses question marks in variable names.

[mklement0]

@ili101:

Is this in the scope of PowerShell/PowerShell#1995?

No, PowerShell/PowerShell#1995 is about fixing the broken argument-passing to external programs when you use PowerShell's syntax.

By contrast, PowerShell/PowerShell#13068 is what you're referring to: the ability to call a command that uses another shell's syntax without modification.

As seductive as that is, I think it is a dead end that will create more problems than it will solve, similar to the problematic --%.

Hence my suggestion to not fight PowerShell's syntax and instead provide an ins (Invoke-NativeShell) cmdlet that takes the command as a string: ins 'dig @8.8.8.8 github.com'

See PowerShell/PowerShell#13068 (comment), PowerShell/PowerShell#13068 (comment), and PowerShell/PowerShell#13068 (comment)