Microsoft announces PowerShell 7 for all the platforms

Just a week after announcing the General Availability of PowerShell 6.2, Microsoft has announced an upgrade for PowerShell on all the platforms.

The new upgrade will bump PowerShell directly to version 7. In a blog post, Microsoft explained why the company decided to make a jump from 6.2 to version 7.

PowerShell Core usage has grown significantly in the last two years. In particular, the bulk of our growth has come from Linux usage, an encouraging statistic given our investment in making PowerShell viable cross-platform…

However, we also can clearly see that our Windows usage has not been growing as significantly, surprising given that PowerShell was popularized on the Windows platform…

This means that Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core users will be able to use the same version of PowerShell to automate across Windows, Linux, and macOS and on Windows, and PowerShell 7 users will have a very high level of compatibility with Windows PowerShell modules they rely on today.

– Microsoft

In other words, Microsoft wants to put all the platforms on the same version of PowerShell for better cross-platform compatibility. Microsoft is also making changes to the Support Lifecycle of PowerShell. The company will release LTS (Long Term Servicing) and non-LTS versions of PowerShell 7 to align it closely with the .NET Core support lifecycle. Microsoft will release PowerShell 7 for Windows users but will allow users to switch between PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7.

Microsoft will roll out PowerShell 7 in May 2019. The General Availability of PowerShell will take time as Microsoft will need to align the release with .NET Core 3.0.