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0 pointsjiggawatts5y ago0 comments

Stop shipping your org chart!

Microsoft has always had this problem, but with PowerShell -- which is supposed to be this unified interface to all things Microsoft -- it is glaringly obvious that teams at Microsoft do not talk to each other.

To this day, the ActiveDirectory commands throw exceptions instead of returning Errors. Are you not allowed to talk to them?

The Exchange "Set" commands, if failing to match the provided user name, helpfully overwrite the first 1,000 users instead because... admins don't need weekends, am I right? Who doesn't enjoy a disaster recovery instead of going to the beach?

I'm what you'd categorise as a power user of PS 5.1, having written many PS1 modules and several C# modules for customers to use at scale. I've barely touched PowerShell Core because support for it within Microsoft is more miss than hit.

For example, .NET Core has caused serious issues. PowerShell needs dynamic DLL loading to work, but .NET Core hasn't prioritised that, because web apps don't need it. The runtime introduced EXE-level flags that should have been DLL-level, making certain categories of PowerShell modules impossible to develop. I gave up. I no longer develop for PowerShell at all. It's just too hard.

It's nice that Out-GridView and Show-Command are back, but they launch under the shell window, which makes them hard to find at the best of times and very irritating when the shell is embedded (E.g.: in VS Code)

The Azure commandlets are generally a pain to work with, so I've switched to ARM Templates for most things because PowerShell resource provisioning scripts cannot be re-run, unlike scripts based on the "az" command line or templates. Graph is a monstrosity, and most of my customers are still using MSOnline and are firmly tied to PS 5.1 for the foreseeable future.

Heaven help you if you need to manage a full suite of Hybrid Office 365 backoffice applications. The connection time alone is a solid 2 minutes. Commands fail regularly due to network or throttling reasons, and scripts in general aren't retry-able as mentioned above. This is a usability disaster.

Last, but not least: Who thought it was a good idea to strip the help content out and force users to jump through hoops to install it? There ought to be a guild of programmers so people like him can be summarily ejected from it!

0 comments

joeyaiello5y ago

Thanks for the thoughtful response! Many of these are totally legitimate: in particular, we're making steady progress to centralize module design, release, documentation, and modernization, or at least to bring many teams closer together. In many cases, we're at a transition point between moving from traditional PS remoting modules and filling out PS coverage for newer OAuth / REST API flows.

I don't know how recently you've tried PS7, but the back-compat (particularly on Windows) is much, much better[1]. And for those places where compatibility isn't there yet, if you're running on Windows, you can just `Import-Module -UseWindowsPowerShell FooModule` and it'll secretly load out-of-proc in Windows PS.

Unfortunately, the .NET problems are outside my area. I'm definitely not the expert, but I believe many of the decisions around the default assembly load context are integral to the refactoring of .NET Core/5+. We are looking into building a generalized assembly load context that allows for "module isolation", and I'd love to get a sense in the issue tracking that[2] whether or not fixing that would help solve some of the difficulties you're having in building modules.

For Azure, you should check out the PSArm[3] module that we just started shipping experimentally. It's basically a PS DSL around ARM templates, as someone who uses PS and writes the Azure JSON, you sound like the ideal target for it.

As for the help content, that's a very funny story for another time :D

[1]: https://aka.ms/psmodulecompat

[2]: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/2083

[3]: https://github.com/powershell/psarm

majkinetor5y ago

It looks like the main problem people have with PowerShell is slow startup. You should probably work on making it snappy as main priority.

As far as module problems are in question, this is IMO not really fair - you can't expect that every team there have the same standards regarding how modules should work, no matter if the team is from Microsoft or not. The best you could do is perhaps form a consulting / standards enforcing team for MS grown modules.

I love PowerShell, its really poster child for how projects should be done on GH.

And I agree with you about REST API - I never use anything else to explore it (including postman and friends) - I am simply more productive in pwsh. We love it in company so much that we always create powershell REST API client for our services by hand (although some generators are available) in order to be in spirit of the language; all automatic tests are done with it, using awesome Pester 5.

Thanks for all the great work. PowerShell makes what I do joy to that point that I am always in it.

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