Breaking Change: Replacement of PowerShell 7.2 preview with 7.1 in .NET 5.0 SDK

[mthalman]

Breaking Change: Replacement of PowerShell 7.2 preview with 7.1 in .NET 5.0 SDK

Summary

The December 2020 and January 2021 servicing updates of the 5.0 SDK Docker images mistakenly included preview versions of PowerShell Core 7.2. The policy is to only include preview versions of PowerShell Core in preview releases of .NET. Since .NET 5 is no longer in preview, the SDK Docker image should only include stable versions of PowerShell. This was an oversight in the development workflow and missed during code reviews. We have not received any reports from users that have been affected by the inclusion of this preview version of PowerShell Core. But as of Jan 19. 2021, the 5.0 SDK Docker images have now been updated to include PowerShell Core 7.1, and PowerShell 7.2 preview is no longer present.

Details

The first release containing the incorrect version of PowerShell Core was for the release of 5.0.101 on Dec. 8, 2020 (#2401) and repeated again for the release of 5.0.102 on Jan. 12, 2021 (#2454). The issue was noticed on Jan. 15, 2021 (#2507) and resolved on Jan. 19, 2021 (#2516).

With the updated Docker images, the PowerShell version has changed from 7.2.0-preview.2 to 7.1.1. All floating tags (e.g. 5.0, 5.0-alpine) will be updated to use the stable 7.1.1 version. Stable version tags (e.g. 5.0.102-buster-slim-amd64) are not being updated because they are explicitly intended to be stable and not introduce changes like this. Because of that, a new stable version tag is being added which provides PowerShell 7.1 instead of 7.2 preview. It adds a a -1 suffix to the version in the tag (e.g. 5.0.102-1-buster-slim-amd64).

If you were previously using a stable tag version and want to make use of the stable version of PowerShell, you will need to update your tag. To do this, you can just add a -1 suffix to the version in the tag (e.g. 5.0.102-1-buster-slim-amd64) or see the latest tag published tags at https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-dotnet-sdk.

In most cases, this change in the PowerShell version is unlikely to affect you. However, if you do encounter a breaking change due to this change in the PowerShell version, you can make use of the previous stable tag version (e.g. 5.0.102-buster-slim-amd64) to use PowerShell Core 7.2 preview instead.

Upon the next servicing release in February, the tagging scheme will no longer use the -1 suffix. There will only be one set of 5.0 sdk tags that all contain PowerShell Core 7.1. There will be no new tags that provide PowerShell Core 7.2 preview. If you had taken a dependency on PowerShell Core 7.2 preview, you will need to switch back to PowerShell Core 7.1 in order to receive further servicing updates.